For at least 3,339 years, nobody has seen what lies behind the west and north walls of the burial chamber of Tutankhamun. But this secret of three millennia might not last much longer.
Second round of radar scanning will look for more clues to what lies behind the walls of Tut’s burial chamber. One theory: the tomb of famous Queen Nefertiti.
On Thursday, Mamdouh Eldamaty, the Egyptian antiquities minister, held a press conference in Cairo to announce a tantalizing new piece of evidence: Radar scans on those walls have revealed not only the presence of hidden chambers, but also unidentified objects that lie within these rooms. These objects, Eldamaty said, seem to be composed of both metal and organic materials.
“It could be the discovery of the century,” he said. Noting that he can’t speculate further about the things that lie within the chambers, he said that another radar test has been scheduled for the end of this month, in order to determine the best way to proceed with the investigation.
The results of the radar scan represent another step toward a radical new understanding of the most famous tomb in Egypt’s Valley of the Kings. First discovered by archaeologist Howard Carter in 1922, the tomb of King Tut yielded an astonishing array of grave goods—more than 5,000 artifacts, many of them in pristine condition. It was the most intact royal tomb ever found, providing Egyptologists with an unprecedented glimpse into the material life of a king who ruled during the 14th century B.C. (Read more about the pharoah who shaped the future of Egypt.)
But for almost a century, nobody imagined that Carter’s painstaking excavation—he spent a decade documenting and clearing objects from the tomb—might be essentially unfinished. In July of last year, Nicholas Reeves, a British archaeologist who specializes in the Valley of the Kings, published a paper claiming that there may in fact be another tomb hidden behind the walls of Tut’s burial chamber.
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In retrospect — hindsight is always 20 / 20 — the discovery of ‘hidden chambers’ in the tomb of Tutankhamun in the Valley of the Kings (KV 62) shouldn’t be that great a surprise to us.
The tomb of Amunhotep III (KV 22 — the tombs are numbered in the order of their discovery and survey, not their construction) had just such a feature. Amunhotep III was probably the grandfather of Tutankhamun, so the tomb-building stratagem would have been known around the time that KV 62 was made.
It didn’t work for Amunhotep III. The single room with some minor ‘treasures’ but no royal sarcophagus proved to be ‘too poor’ to fool the tomb-robbers. This pharaoh — now known to us as ‘Amunhotep the Magnificent’ — was simply too rich to pretend that this decoy chamber was his treasury. The looters found the way to the remainder of Amunhotep III’s massive tomb — hidden behind the painted plaster — and stripped it bare.
The wrecked plaster ‘doors’ in what is now called the ‘entrance room’ of KV 22 have been long since removed. The only clues to their former presence are the breaks in the wall paintings that remain.
The important thing to keep in mind is that practically all of KV 22 was behind that painted plaster. Like it, the main part of KV 62 was made first, and it’s probably larger than the part Howard Carter discovered, which was created to hide it.
More remote-sensing results are expected on Saturday, April 2.