The world’s largest collection of tapes has been found in a previously unseen vault inside the Pyramid of Khafre in Giza, Egypt.
The Pyramid of Khafre is the second largest of Egypt’s ancient pyramids and was the final resting place for the Pharaoh Khafre, who ruled between 2558 and 2532 BC.
According to Egyptologist Dr Naomi Warren, Khafre was one of ancient Egypt’s biggest music collectors and was single handedly responsible for the development of the “ninety minute tape”.
“This is another very important discovery in the study of ancient Egypt,” explained Dr Warren, who has been leading an excavation team in the Pyramid of Khafre since 2006. “We’ve always known that Khafre was a big music fan and we recently discovered ancient editions of Mixmag written in hieroglyphics in his tomb so we were confident if we continued to search we’d eventually find his music collection.”
“We actually discovered the vault late last year but we only managed to gain safe access to it early yesterday morning. We certainly were not disappointed with what we discovered inside,” continued the Egyptologist. “The tales of Khafre’s vast music collection were true. We found over a quarter of a million perfectly preserved tapes inside.”
Dr Watts claimed that Khafre used an “intricate filing system” for his tapes and that any tape in his collection could be found in matter of seconds.
“The tapes were all split into genre’s, with each genre arranged alphabetically,” explained Watts. “This may not seem like much, but when you consider that ancient Egypt out dates the English alphabet, tapes and modern music by a couple of thousand years, it really is a great fete. Those Egyptians really were ahead of their time.”
Khafre’s tape collection will be documented over the coming months and year’s. Early indications suggest that it is mainly made up of ancient forms of dance music, such as hard house and techno.
