ROMSO Cyprus Knowledge Base

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Major-General Richard William Howard Vyse ( - ) is a military, anthropologist, and an Egyptologist of British nationality. Vyse first visited Egypt in 1835, where he met Giovanni Battista Caviglia. In 1836 Vyse and Caviglia began excavations in Giza. The Vyse/Caviglia association did not go well and in 1837 he teamed up with engineer John Shae Perring, he searched many pyramids of the Memphite region in Egypt, not hesitant to make use of gunpowder.

Discovery

Vyse made a very notable discovery in the Great Pyramid of Giza. After Giovanni Battista Caviglia abandoned the idea of exploding the south side of the relaxation room (Davison's room 1765), Vyse suspected that there was another room on the top of Davison's room, since he could insert a reed "about two feet" up through a crack in a cavity. It detonates directly the north side, for three and a half months, finding four additional rooms. Vyse appoints these chambers with the names of his friends and colleagues; Wellington Room, Nelson Room, Lady Arbuthnot Room and Campbell Room.

Vyse issued a strong rebuttal rejecting Caviglia's accusation that he had informed him of his suspicions that there was probably another room directly above Davison's room. According to Caviglia, Vyse betrays his confidence and has him removed from the Giza site in order to claim the discovery for himself.

He finds the cartridge of King Kheops drawn on one of the immense and heavy granite blocks of the discharge chamber.

The Kheops cartridge is located on the south ceiling at the west end; Mark Lehner was able to see this cartridge during his study visit in the 1970s and published the photo in 1997.

Vyse does not hesitate to use gunpowder, to explore the great pyramid and thus make his discovery of the cartridge and the king's chamber.

Some suspect Vyse to have drawn the Kheops cartridge himself, but this hypothesis is contradicted by several points:

The egyptology is only in its early days, and Vyse being more an adventurer than a hieroglyphic scholar, what would have stimulated Vyse to draw this cartridge? Indeed, the controversy over the identity of the great pyramid appeared much later, starting from the .

Another point, not least, is that the famous English Egyptologist William Matthew Flinders Petrie discovered in 1903 the famous tiny statuette of Kheops, on which one can see to the left of his throne, the Kheops cartridge identical to that which Vyse discovered in the great pyramid.

Vyse also explored the Mykerino pyramid, which is one of the three pyramids on the Giza plateau. He breaks a path inside and finds the king's sarcophagus.

Although empty, the marble sarcophagus was an immeasurable discovery