Coffer Sonics 3D

The coffer is a resonator, not a sarcophagus

The coffer of the King's Chamber is a hollow granite block, carved from a single monolith with millimetre metrological precision. Its internal dimensions, measured by Sir Flinders Petrie in 1883, are 1.978 by 0.677 by 0.872 metres. Mainstream archaeology has always interpreted it as the pharaoh's sarcophagus. But no body was ever found inside, there is no inscription identifying it as such, and its geometry is not that of a sarcophagus: it is that of a tuned acoustic resonator.

The fundamental mode of the major axis, for the intact coffer, is 343 divided by 2 by 1.978, which gives 86.7 hertz. That would have been the original tone. The present coffer is chipped at one corner, and the effective acoustic length drops to about 1.58 metres. Recalculating: 343 divided by 2 by 1.58, which gives 108.7 hertz. Tom Danley, in 1990, measured 110 hertz. The difference between the theoretical model and the experimental measurement is 1.2 per cent. The numbers match.

86.7 hertz is not just any frequency. It is the third reinforcing harmonic of the King's Chamber band, which oscillates around 30 hertz. The original coffer, tuned to 86.7 hertz, was a harmonics transferer from the low bands of the chambers to the high bands of the distribution tunnels. The intact system was coherently tuned: each cavity reinforced the others through specific harmonics, and the whole complex worked as a single multi-band distributed amplifier. With the coffer chipped, the frequency drifted out of its original tuning, and the system's accord was lost.