For over 200 years, archaeologists have been painstakingly excavating the Great Pyramid, also known as the Pyramid of Khufu.

But despite the thousands of hours put into discovery at the site, only three relics have been successfully extracted.

Known as the Dixon Relics, the trio of artifacts was discovered in 1872 by Waynman Dixon and James Grant, meaning it has been over 150 years since additional discoveries have been made.

And stranger still? We still don’t know exactly what the artifacts are – or where one of them was for nearly seven decades.

Dixon and Grant came across the relics while exploring an air shaft leading from the Queen’s Chamber.

Reports from the time of the discovery suggested that the items may have been tools that were used in the construction of the Great Pyramid, but the exact function remains a topic of debate even in the present day.

After leaving Egypt, Dixon held onto two of the objects, eventually housing them in the British Museum in London.

The pairing consists of a small stone ball and a hooked copper item in the shape of a dove’s tail, which the museum believes to have been construction tools, though others posit that they may actually be spiritual in nature, to allow King Khufu’s departing spirit to exit the chamber and travel to the afterlife.

Grant also kept an object upon departing Egypt, a 13-centimeter (five-inch) piece of cedar wood that was once part of a larger wooden object within the pyramid. In the 1940s, Grant’s daughter donated the item to the University of Aberdeen, yet it was apparently not properly classified and almost immediately went missing.

Thankfully, researches stumbled upon the object accidentally back in 2019, finding the object hiding inside a cigar tin within the University’s Asia collection.

Egyptologists finally had a chance to study it, with radiocarbon dating revealing that it was first crafted some time between 3341 and 3094 BCE, more than 500 years before the Great Pyramid was constructed.

Though they can now more accurately date the object, they still can’t fully confirm what its use was.

Some believe it was part of a measuring rule used during the construction of the pyramid, though that’s hard to confirm without being able to access the rest of the piece.

Unfortunately, that is currently stuck in an inaccessible cavity within the pyramid and was last seen using a robotic camera in 1993, meaning we may never fully get an answer.

Hopefully, there will be opportunities in the future to continue to excavate the pyramid and get more clues into how they were built and how ancient Egyptians lived.

If you thought that was interesting, you might like to read about the mysterious “pyramids” discovered in Antarctica. What are they?