One of the most mysterious features of the Great Pyramid of Giza
are the so called "air shafts". It has been suggested that the
shafts were used to ventilate the monument during construction.
This would certainly be a problem, but the shafts do not run all
the way to the outside and so they may not have been able to
fulfil this function. No shafts were discovered in other
pyramids, so it seems that the ancient builders had found
another way of overcoming this problem. The discovery of small
finely finished limestone "doors" at the top of the shafts
suggests that there was more to the shafts than ventilation.
This was a very popular theory among scholars, but most are now
of the opinion that it is unlikely that they served such a
mundane purpose. Stadelmann suggested that the shafts allowed
the king's soul to travel to the "stars that never die" (the
circumpolar stars in the northern sky) and the "land of light"
(the southern sky). This argument has a certain simplicity, and
seems quite reasonable. No similar