More than three millenniums after Tutankhamun was buried in southern Egypt, and a century after his tomb was discovered, Egyptologists are still arguing over who the chamber was built for. The debate is a global sport.
Nicholas Reeves is a cat lover who shares a home with a cat. There were rooms hidden behind the northern and western walls of Tutankhamun's burial vault, according to a theory put forward by a former curator.
Until Tutankhamun died at 19 years old, it was thought that the small burial chamber was intended to be a private tomb for Ay. The tomb was an antechamber to a grander sepulcher for Nefertiti. Behind the north wall was a corridor that could lead to Nefertiti's funerary apartments.
Ground-penetrating radar was used by the Egyptian government to detect and survey underground. At a news conference in Cairo in March 2016 Mamdouh Eldamaty showed the preliminary results of radar scans that showed anomalies beyond the decorated north and west walls of the tomb.
He announced that there was a 90 percent chance that something was waiting outside of the building. The press was always trying to get odds. radar will either reveal more about Tutankhamun's tomb than we know or it won't.
Two years and two separate radar surveys later, the antiquities minister declared that there were no hidden rooms inside the tomb. The final scans were not released for scrutiny. National Geographic magazine withdrew funding for the project after it was announced.
Zahi Hawass is the author of King Tutankhamun: The Treasures of the Tomb. In ancient Egypt, any king would not be allowed to block the tomb of another person. This would be against everything they believe in. It is not possible. The mythical Horus buried his father, Osiris, as the tomb of his predecessors was closed. The north wall of the burial chamber is labeled Ay burying Tutankhamun.
Kara Cooney is a professor of Egyptian art and architecture at the University of California. She said that Nick's work is carefully researched and evidence based. Most Egyptologists are afraid of losing their access to tombs and excavation concessions. They are simply jerks.
The doctor kept going despite the setbacks. A freshly revised edition of his 1990 book, "The Complete Tutankhamun: 100 Years of Discovery", will be published in January. He believes that Tutankhamun was buried in the hallway of the tomb of Nefertiti.
Most of what Tutankhamun took to the grave had nothing to do with him. He claimed that King Tut's famous gold death mask was part of a suite of burial equipment that had been used to take him to the afterlife.
The father of Tutankhamun was a so-called heretic king. Amun, Osiris and Egypt's traditional gods were rejected by the 18th-dynasty pharaoh. For his new god, Akhenaten created a city from scratch at el-Amarna and prepared royal tombs for himself and his family.
Tutankhamun succeeded directly after Smenkhkare. Smenkhkare and Nefertiti were the same person, and that the queen changed her name to Neferneferuaten during a time of co-rule with her husband. This rare woman pharaoh would be buried by the boy-king.
During King Tut's decade-long reign, he appeared to have been mostly occupied with fixing the mess he had created. A new dynasty chiseled his name into dust after he died.
Over the years, Dr. Reeves has done research in the tomb. He came to his theory about Tutankhamun after looking at high-resolution color photographs of the tomb that were published online by a company based in Madrid and Bologna, Italy. The lines beneath the painted walls were shown in the pictures. He speculated that one doorway in the west opened into a Tutankhamun-era storeroom, and that the other doorway in the hallway was similar to the queen's corridor tomb.
From the face of the north wall subject, I knew that the larger tomb belonged to Nefertiti. The storage chamber to the west of the burial chamber may have been used as a funerary suite for other missing members of the royal family.
The north wall of the tomb was painted with a strange spelling on it. The figure beneath the first cartouche is named as Tutankhamun's Pharaonic successor, Ay, and is shown performing a funerary ritual to restore the deceased's senses. The Ay cartouches show that the birth and throne names of Tutankhamun have been altered.
The cartouches were put to new use after Tut's predecessor was buried. There are clear, underlying traces of a reed leaf if you inspect the birth-name cartouche closely. The first character of Tutankhamun's name, '-amun,' is the hieroglyph.
There is a rare variant writing of Tutankhamun's throne name, "nebkheperure," employing three scarab beetles. The only plausible explanation for the strange three-scarab version of the Ay throne name "Kheperkheperure" is found in this variant.
He deduced that the scene depicted Tutankhamun presiding over the burial of Nefertiti instead of Ay. He said there are two visual culprits. The Ay figure's double underchin, which is not present in any image currently recognizable as him, suggests that the original painting of the king must have been of the chubby, young Tutankhamun. The face of the mummified recipient is a perfect match for the profile of the painted limestone bust of Nefertiti on display in the Berlin museum.
The depiction of Tutankhamun's own tomb would not have made sense. The scene shows Tutankhamun's tomb as the burial place of the previous king and that he was buried in her outer chambers.
Rita Lucarelli is an Egyptologist at the University of California, Berkeley. The tomb of Nefertiti would be intact if he is correct. Even if there is a tomb there, it may not be that of Nefertiti. Unless we dig through the bedrock, we can't know it.
Finding a way to drill through the north wall is the problem, according to Dr. Lucarelli. She said that other archaeologists don't sympathize with the theory.
Unsympathetic colleagues are legion.
An Egyptologist at the University of Bristol said thatNick is flogging a dead horse in his theories. He has provided no clear proof that the cartouches have been changed, and his iconographic arguments as to the faces on the wall have been rejected by every other Egyptologist I know.
The author of " When Women Ruled The World" argues that Nefertiti might have been Tut's grandmother. She said that she wasn't laughing behind their hands. Egypt has refused to give permits to Western scholars who disagree with the party line because of the politics of the country. The north wall of Tutankhamun's tomb may be empty. It might be Al Capone's safe. This could possibly be the discovery of the millennium.
Politics of heritage is one of the reasons for the backlash against Dr. Reeves. The Egyptian people took the discovery of Tutankhamun's tomb as a cry to end 1920s British rule and establish a modern Egyptian identity. The decolonization of the field is one of the hottest topics among Egyptologists today.
Some people in Egypt take a different view than I do. His face was covered with a tired expression. Archaeologists in the U.K. would be interested in who a foreigner sounded off on. My intellectual responsibility as an Egyptologist is to seek out the evidence and report honestly and objectively on what I find.
He said that Nefertiti plus Tutankhamun is a big ask because of the raft of new facts. He understands the skepticism with which his proposals have been received. I initially shared it, but I would spend a year testing and retesting my conclusions before publishing.
The evidence is stronger now than it was then. With the discovery that both Ay and Tutankhamun's cartouches are different, we have a smoking gun. Denying the evidence is not going to make it disappear.
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