King Tut's Tomb Has No Secrets Left [View all]
Researchers had long wondered if Queen Nefertiti was buried somewhere unseen in the tomb
(NEWSER) -
A longstanding mystery that had Egyptologists scratching their heads has finally been unraveled. Per National Geographic, radar scans inside King Tutankhamun's tomb recently concluded that there are no burial chambers hidden behind the walls. For the last several years, researchers had wondered at the possibility that Queen Nefertiti could have been buried someplace alongside the final resting place of Tut.
New scans have provided conclusive evidence that there are no hidden rooms inside the chamber, Egypt's antiquities ministry said Sunday. Per the AP, Mostafa Waziri, Secretary General of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said an Italian team conducted extensive studies with ground-penetrating radar that showed the tomb did not contain any hidden, man-made blocking walls as was earlier suspected.
Francesco Porcelli of the Polytechnic University of Turin presented the findings at an international conference in Cairo. In 2015, British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves proposed, after analysis of high-definition laser scans, that queen Nefertiti's tomb could be concealed behind wall paintings in the famed boy king's burial chamber. The discovery ignited massive interest, with officials first rushing to support the theory but then later distancing themselves and ultimately rejecting it.
The ministry says two previous scans by Japanese and American scientists had proved inconclusive, but insists this latest ground-penetrating radar data closes the lid on the tomb having such hidden secrets. "It is concluded, with a very high degree of confidence... the hypothesis concerning the existence of hidden chambers or corridors adjacent to Tutankhamun's tomb is not supported by the GPR data," it said in its statement.
= new reply since forum marked as read
