Three Objects Left The Pyramid In 1872. One Came Back In A Cigar Tin.
The cedar came back with a radiocarbon date three to five centuries older than the pyramid it was taken from. It is the date of a tree, and the tree was old when somebody cut it down.
A months-long reporting project. Documents cited below are held in The Vault and available to readers.
ABERDEEN, Scotland — A granite ball, a bronze hook, and a piece of cedar 12.7 centimetres long. Those are the three objects taken out of the northern shaft of the Queen's Chamber in 1872, and they are the only things ever removed from inside the Great Pyramid that anybody wrote down at the time.
The ball and the hook went to London and have been on a register ever since. The cedar went home to Aberdeen in a doctor's luggage and was not seen again for seventy-one years.
It turned up in 2019, in a cigar tin, in the wrong drawer.
This newspaper reconstructed the nine hands the tin passed through and paid two laboratories to date a four-millimetre sliver of what is left.
The date came back 3341–3094 BC. The pyramid is assigned to a reign three to five centuries later than that.
What the date is a date of
It is a date of a tree.
That sentence is the entire argument and it took Professor Halldór Ekwueme-Sandoval about forty seconds to say it, in the tone of a man who has said it a great many times to people who wanted a different answer.
A cedar of Lebanon can live a thousand years. Radiocarbon measures when a ring stopped exchanging carbon with the air, not when an axe went into the trunk, and certainly not when a builder used the plank. Take your sample from the innermost surviving heartwood of a slow, old tree and you will get a date centuries before the felling.
We took our sample from the innermost surviving heartwood, because that is the part of a degraded fragment that is left.
Both laboratories agree with each other to within five years at each end of the range. They are measuring the same wood correctly. The wood is simply older than the thing it was found in, and there is no version of this experiment that would not have produced that result.
The 3.8 centimetres
The 1872 photograph shows the piece whole, laid against a rule, at 12.7 centimetres.
Five fragments survive. Laid end to end they come to 8.9.
The missing 3.8 centimetres is not in any laboratory book, because it did not go to a laboratory. It went to a lecture. A printed programme for the Philosophical Institution, January 1873, lists among the evening's demonstrations the combustion of a portion of the pyramid cedar.
Somebody burned it to show a room full of people that it burned.
That is the only part of this object that has actually been destroyed, and it was destroyed on purpose, in public, with tickets.
The typed digit
The seventy-one years are the part everyone wants to be a secret, and they are a keystroke.
In 1948 the university dissolved several departmental collections and re-accessioned them centrally. The cedar left Anatomy as 1926.4.88 and entered the general collection on a typed index card as 1948.7.331.
It should read 1948.7.313.
Three-one-three became three-three-one, and the tin went into a run of Sudanese material two drawers away, where it sat correctly filed under a number that was wrong.
One person would have caught it. Miss Wilhelmina Traquair-Ashby kept a private concordance of the whole 1948 transfer in a notebook, cross-checking the new numbers against the old slips. She retired in 1971, thirty-nine years in post, and the notebook went home with her papers.
What the keeper says
Dr. Fenella Aikenhead-Osei's reply runs at the foot of this page and she is not gracious about us, which is why we asked her.
The fragment was never lost, she writes. It was in a numbered tin behind a locked door with a register beside it, and anybody who asked for 1948.7.331 would have been handed it. What failed was one digit in a finding aid.
She also puts the three women who typed the 1948 cards on the record: fourteen months, eleven thousand objects, forty-one transposition errors, manual typewriters, no means of checking. Under four errors in a thousand.
And she notes, correctly, that we asked for the sliver from the innermost surface and therefore knew the shape of our own story before the laboratory opened the envelope.
What this desk takes from it
The most famous object ever removed from the Great Pyramid spent seven decades three feet from where it should have been, because two numbers changed places on a card, and the one person who would have noticed took her notebook home.
Nothing about that required anybody to decide anything. It required a Tuesday.
We would rather print that than the version where the date is the pyramid's, and we would rather print it knowing that the version where the date is the pyramid's is the one that will travel.
The six o'clock edition
Three stories a morning, in your inbox before the coffee is made.
Sources & Method
We treated the object as a chain of custody rather than a mystery: nine holders, each of whom left paper somewhere, and we went and read the paper. Where the chain depended on a number — the length in an 1872 photograph, the accession digits on a 1948 card — we photographed the number rather than quoting somebody's transcription of it. The dating was commissioned twice, on split halves of one sliver, from laboratories that did not know of each other.
Who we spoke to
- Dr. Fenella Aikenhead-Osei, Keeper of Special Collections at the university that holds the fragment. Interviewed twice in the store; sent the full draft and replied in writing May and July 2026 Objects to our headline and to the word 'lost'. Printed in full under Right of Reply.
- Nkechi Ballantyne-Sowah, Curatorial assistant; opened the tin in 2019. Interviewed in person, twice, and walked us through the drawer run May 2026 Was auditing tins because a tin is the one container nobody had a list of.
- Prof. Halldór Ekwueme-Sandoval, Radiocarbon scientist; not connected to either dating laboratory. Sent both laboratory reports blind and asked what he would tell a newspaper June 2026 Supplied the old-wood explanation, and the sentence that ends this argument.
- Two accelerator mass spectrometry laboratories, Commissioned independently on split halves of one 4mm sliver. Paid at commercial rate, £2,240 in total; both reports published entire, calibration curves included April–June 2026 3341–3094 BC and 3336–3092 BC, both at 95.4 per cent.
- The holders' own paperwork, Auction book 1919, probate inventory 1919, two accession registers, one lecture programme, one index card. Read in three archives; the card photographed with the keeper's permission March–June 2026
What we could not confirm
- That the cedar came out of the shaft at all. The only evidence is Dunsmore's own letter and a sketch he made afterwards. No third party watched it come out, and everything downstream of that letter — including our radiocarbon date — inherits his word for it.
- How far in from the bark the sliver sits. We asked for a ring count and could not get one; the surface is too degraded to resolve rings. The old-wood offset is therefore unbounded. It could be a hundred and fifty years. It could be six hundred. We are certain of the direction and not of the size.
- Whether the 1873 demonstration burned this piece or a different one. The programme says 'a portion of the pyramid cedar'. Nobody wrote down which portion, and the arithmetic of 12.7 against 8.9 is the only reason we attach the two events to each other.
How Others Covered This
The same events, as reported elsewhere on the same day. We list what each outlet had that we did not, as well as what we had that they did not — including where we come off worse. Why we print this.
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The Hollow PostThe Pyramid Is Five Hundred Years Older And Aberdeen Sat On It For Seventy
Treated the misfiling as suppression and the radiocarbon date as the age of the building.
Had that we did not
The date range, quoted accurately from the laboratory's own summary.
Left out
Old wood. Every radiocarbon scientist they might have rung would have said it in one sentence, and the piece quotes none.
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ApertureThe Tin
An essay on what a collection is, built around a cigar tin with a dead brand on the lid.
Had that we did not
The best paragraph anyone has written about the smell of the drawer, which we cannot match and did not try to.
Left out
The 1873 lecture, and therefore the 3.8 centimetres, and therefore the only part of this object's history that was actually destroyed.
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They Buriedthis newspaperThree Objects Left The Pyramid In 1872. One Came Back In A Cigar Tin.
Reconstructed nine holders from their own paperwork and paid two laboratories to date the same sliver.
Had that we did not
Both laboratory reports, the 1948 card photographed as typed, and the reasoning that takes the date off the building.
Left out
We cut four millimetres off a four-and-a-half-thousand-year-old object to make a story, and we disclosed it at the foot of the page rather than saying it in the third paragraph where a reader would meet it. — V. Ashcombe-Doyle, standards editor
Right of Reply
They Buried contacted Dr. Fenella Aikenhead-Osei, Keeper of Special Collections on 30 June 2026 with the full draft, the laboratory reports and a photograph of the index card; twenty-one days offered. Replied 19 July 2026. Printed in full and unedited. She asked that nothing be cut and nothing has been.
I will start with the thing you got right, because it is not nothing: the offset is old wood, you went and asked somebody who works on it, and you have taken a date off a building that a great many outlets put back on it this spring. Thank you for that. It is more than we could do from a press office.
Now the rest.
The fragment was never lost. It was in a drawer, in a numbered tin, in a room with a locked door and a register on the shelf beside it, for seventy-one years. Every day of those seventy-one years you could have walked in, given the number 1948.7.331, and been handed it. What was wrong was not the object's location. It was one digit in the finding aid. Those are different failures and only one of them is ours.
I would also ask you to look at who typed that card. The 1948 transfer was done in fourteen months by three women on temporary contracts, working from handwritten slips, re-accessioning eleven thousand objects out of departments that were being dissolved around them. They made, by our own audit, forty-one transposition errors in eleven thousand entries. That is an error rate of under four in a thousand, achieved on a manual typewriter with no means of checking, and your story describes the outcome as having been done 'by a typist' in a tone I do not think you would use about a curator.
On Miss Traquair-Ashby: yes, she kept a private concordance, and yes, she would have caught it, and she retired in 1971 and the concordance went into her house and came back to us in 2004 in a box of her papers that took nine years to work through. That is not a scandal. That is what happens when institutional memory lives in one person's notebook, which is a real criticism of this university and one I have made in writing, twice, in funding submissions that were not successful.
And on your four millimetres. We approved the sample. I signed the form. I would sign it again, because a date that removes five centuries of nonsense is worth four millimetres. But you asked for the sliver from the innermost surviving surface, which is precisely the part of the object that carries the oldest wood, and then you published a date you knew would be too old before you took it. I do not think that was dishonest. I think it was convenient, and I would like it on the record that the shape of your story was available to you before the laboratory was.
Published unedited under our right-of-reply guarantee.
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