Geophysics reveals what lies beyond King Tut's tomb Will it lead to Nefertiti?
Although the tomb of the young King Tutankhamun, discovered by Howard Carter in 1922, is described as one of the most famous archaeological tombs in the world, many mysteries surrounding it remain unsolved. The most prominent of these is that this tomb, bearing the number "KV62", is unusually small for a tomb of a king from the Eighteenth Dynasty. Was it part of a larger tomb?
This hypothesis is based on the fact that the young king died about a decade after assuming the throne, and the death was sudden, early and unexpected. Those responsible for the burial faced a problem, which was that a royal burial had to be prepared quickly, so an existing cemetery was reused, and part of it was allocated for the burial of the young king.
This hypothesis was supported by observations made more than ten years ago by British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves, the former director of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project in the Valley of the Kings, when he pointed out in his 2015 report on the project that there was something unusual in the northern wall of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, where high-resolution scans carried out under his supervision revealed straight vertical lines appearing in the plaster layer beneath the current decorations. These lines appear to represent the remains of architectural divisions older than the shape of the chamber known today.
Most importantly, one of these lines coincides with the western wall of the waiting room (the room located in the heart of the tomb between the entrance and the burial chamber), which suggests that the waiting room may have originally extended northward, across the space that later became Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, in the form of a corridor nearly the width of the waiting room.
For Reeves, these details were not merely decorative; in his estimation, they were traces of an older structure that had disappeared beneath the current decorations. He concluded that "Tutankhamun's burial chamber may not have originally been a burial chamber, but rather part of a larger tomb, which was then modified after Tutankhamun's sudden death."
This hypothesis tempted others to ask a more intriguing question: to whom did the original tomb belong? The name of Nefertiti emerged, who is believed to have died before Tutankhamun, and the location of her tomb has been the goal sought by scientists for decades.
Searching behind the wall
The mere mention of the name "Nefertiti" was enough to whet the appetite and arouse the passion to find out what lay beyond the northern wall that Reeves referred to in his report. Naturally, it was not possible to demolish the wall to find out what lay beyond it, so the transition was made from theoretical archaeological analysis to applied science. Here came the role of one of the tools of "geophysics," namely "ground-penetrating radar," or what is known as "GPR," which was used in more than one study to determine what lay beyond the wall. The most recent of these was a study by an Italian research team published in October 2019 in the Journal of Cultural Heritage.
Tags:
science
