The buzz all started in 2015 when archaeologists studied high resolution images of the northern and western internal walls of King Tut’s tomb. Zooming in on the high resolution images, they found markings in the plaster the bore and uncanny resemblance to ones found by Howard Carter in 1922.
Pixabay Carter’s markings turned out to be the entrance to King Tut’s Tomb itself! So, when scientists made the discovery and then radar specialist Hirokatsu Watanabe confirmed their findings in 2016, Egyptologists minds ran wild with the possibilities of what could be found in the secret chamber. The most popular theory speculated that the secret chamber held the lost remains of Nerfertiti, King Tut’s stepmother. In fact, Egypt’s Minister of Antiquities at the time, Mamdouh Eldamaty said, “We can say more than 90 percent that the chambers are there.”
Science Alert Sadly, that has not turned out to be the case. After Watanabe did his radar scans, a second team was called in to confirm his findings. They were unable to get the same results. From ScienceAlert.com: Now the third set of scans, led by archaeologist Francesco Porcelli of the Polytechnic University in Turin, has performed the function of a tie-breaker. The team used ground-penetrating radar - nondestructive technology often used to find cracks and cavities under the ground - to comprehensively scan the walls of the tomb.
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Flickr They performed the scan along vertical and horizontal axes with very dense spatial sampling, using double antenna polarisations, looking for evidence of an empty space. They found none. The speculation that Nefertiti was buried in a secret chamber are fueled by the theory that King Tut’s Tomb appears to have been built for a queen, not a king. From a Sep 2015 article in ScienceAlert: Speaking with Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist from the University of Arizona who took the photographs, el-Damaty said a popular theory is that when King Tutankhamun died unexpectedly in 1323 BC at just 19 years old, his body was rushed into a new burial chamber that was essentially ’tacked onto’ the side of his step-mother, Queen Nefertiti’s, tomb.
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Wikipedia Support for this theory comes from the fact that the design of King Tut’s tomb appears to be more suited to a queen than a king, Reeves says. Rossella Lorenzi explains at Discovery News: “He argued that a painting located behind King Tut’s sarcophagus has been wrongly interpreted. The painting shows Ay (who largely directed King Tut’s reign and succeeded him) performing the Opening of the Mouth ritual on the boy king. The figure labelled Tutankhamun would actually be Nefertiti. He noted that the lines at the corner of the figure’s mouth are a trademark in pictures of Nefertiti. On the other hand, the figure labelled Ay would be Tutankhamun, completing the death ritual for Nefertiti.”
Pixabay After this third scan, experts are considering the issue settled and are blaming the painted plaster covering the walls for the misleading radar results. What do you think? Is there a secret chamber tucked away somewhere in King Tut’s tomb? If not, where is Queen Nefertiti buried? Leave a comment and let us know.