Fresh off announcing that they may have discovered secret chambers in the Great Pyramid, Egyptian officials are now saying that they are 90% sure that they have identified a hidden chamber behind the walls of the tomb of King Tutankhamun.
Tut’s tomb itself lay hidden for millennia, before Howard Carter famously opened the chamber in 1922, revealing a cache of treasures. Now, 93 years later, it seems that Tut’s burial chamber was just one part of a larger complex.
Egyptologist Nicolas Reeves suggested in August that the famous Queen Nefertiti may actually be buried in a secret chamber beside Tut’s tomb, after noticing a number of strange fissures and cracks in the walls of the room.
In a press conference, Egyptian officials announced that scans carried out recently are highly suggestive that a secret chamber does indeed lie behind the walls of Tut’s tomb:
The primary results of the scan give us very positive results, very good results. We have here something behind the west and the north walls. It could be a burial chamber, especially behind the north wall. But this result…it is [a] primary result. We need more more time to solve the data and work to give us accurate results from the data, and [this will take] more than one month.
…But we can say now that we have defined behind the burial chamber of King Tutankhamun another chamber, another tomb, something behind – approximately 90% positive.
For more on about the discovery, see this National Geographic story which gives a nice insider perspective of the process of examining the tomb:
The room hushed, and Watanabe began to push the [radar scan] cart along the wall once more. After moving a little more than half of the distance, he broke the silence: “They changed the material here.”
This was exactly the point at which there seemed to be a doorway on the Factum Arte scans. Watanabe is not an Egyptologist, and he had not studied Reeves’s ideas closely, but what he observed on the radar matched up. He did one more scan of the west wall, and then he proceeded to the north. “It’s just a solid wall,” he called out, at the beginning. He reached the section of the wall that Reeves had proposed was a blocked-over partition. “There is a change from here,” Watanabe announced.
After he was finished, he studied the multicolored bars that ran across the computer screen. “Obviously it’s an entrance to something,” he said through a translator. “It’s very obvious that this is something. It’s very deep.”
We look forward to hearing more about this discovery – imagine the excitement if this does indeed turn out to be a previously unopened tomb, and of one of Egypt’s most celebrated rulers!
Related stories:
- Has an Egyptologist Discovered the Lost Tomb of Nefertiti?
- Pyramid Scan Identifies an ‘Impressive Anomaly’ Behind the Blocks of the Great Pyramid
- Listen to the 3000-Year-Old Trumpets of King Tutankhamun
- Secret Pyramid Chambers: New Project Will Use Latest Technology to Search for Hidden Rooms in the Monuments of Egypt
