Has Egypt’s Nefertiti burial riddle finally been solved?

The burial mask of Tutankhamun still dazzles visitors to Cairo’s Museum of Egyptian Antiquities, almost a century after it was discovered to great fanfare in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings.

Now, this celebrated tomb has become the source of fresh intrigue and mystery, as a British archaeologist has suggested it could solve one of Egyptology’s greatest puzzles: where was Nefertiti buried?

Thought by many to be Tutankhamun’s mother, Nefertiti, who lived more than 3,000 years ago, was the celebrated chief consort to pharaoh Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s father, and may have ruled in her own right.

In a recently published monograph, Dr Nicholas Reeves, who is attached to the University of Arizona, says that digital scans of Tutankhamun’s tomb published last year have yielded results that are “beyond intriguing”.

Based on months of detailed analysis, his hypothesis is that two previously unknown secret doorways, sealed up by tomb builders, lead off from the room where Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus was placed.

On the far side of one of these doorways is believed to be a storage room. The other doorway, sited in what Dr Reeves refers to as the north wall, is thought to be hiding the tomb of the Egyptian queen, a pivotal figure in Egyptian history thanks to her championing of new religious and artistic movements.

Using the scans, Dr Reeves has identified what are thought to be the edges of doorframes underneath the plasterwork of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, which is known to specialists as KV 62.

Dr Reeves admits that some of the conclusions he has drawn by assessing the scans could be seen as “fanciful”. But he insists they are supported by several lines of evidence, among them comparison with the layout of other tombs and with similar “ghost” doorways elsewhere in the Valley of the Kings, which lies on the River Nile’s west bank.

“The pieces of the jigsaw begin to fall convincingly into place,” he writes, before going on to add: “The evidence presented in this paper points cumulatively and compellingly towards the existence of a significantly larger ground plan for KV 62 than has previously been acknowledged.”

That this larger ground plan is associated with the burial of Nefertiti, who lived in the 14th century BC, is suggested by a scene on a wall that has a “pharaonic character”, indicating that a queen was buried there. Dr Reeves also suggests there were “massive, pharaonic-style shrine panels” in the tomb.

“Only one female royal of the late Eighteenth Dynasty is known to have received such honours, and that is Nefertiti,” he writes.

“It is not by chance, therefore, that Nefertiti’s image may be discerned in this north wall’s decoration, which must have been erected as a blind following her internment here as pharaoh.”

Howard Carter, the British archaeologist who revealed Tutankhamun’s tomb to the world in 1922, “lacked the technology to see beneath the tomb’s painted walls”, according to Dr Reeves.

“Accepting the oddly positioned rock-cut niches as evidence that the burial chamber’s walls were completely solid, [Howard] brought his search to a close – wholly unaware that a more significant find by far may have been lying but inches from his grasp,” he writes.

Dr Reeves’ hypothesis would explain why, for all of the riches that it contained, the tomb where Tutankhamun was placed is smaller than would be expected for an individual of his significance; rather than being a main tomb, it perhaps merely leads on to another burial chamber that is even more majestic.

Martina Ullman, a researcher in the department of Egyptology and Coptology at Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich, said Nefertiti’s original resting place was “undoubtedly” at Amarna, the city built by her pharaoh husband, Akhenaten. The subsequent moving of her body has created “lots of difficulties” for archaeologists.

She added that, in Egyptology, producing firm conclusions was never easy, so even ideas with apparently scant evidence to support them should not be dismissed out of hand.

“You’re always dealing with a small number of facts, proven facts, and you have to build up theories on this. It’s like a big puzzle and you only have a few pieces,” she said.

Dr Reeves himself hopes there will soon be further evidence against which his hypothesis can be judged.

In his paper, he calls for “a full and detailed geophysical survey of this famous tomb and its surrounding area” to determine with more certainty whether, indeed, Nefertiti’s tomb could be concealed behind that of Tutankhamun.

“I would suggest [this is] one of Egyptology’s highest priorities,” he says.

foreign.desk@thenational.ae