Mysterious 'Anomalies' Have Been Detected Beyond King Tut's Tomb. Could They Be Secret Passageways Leading to the Long-Lost Remains of Queen Nefertiti?

When archaeologist Howard Carter unearthed the entrance to an ancient Egyptian tomb in 1922, he found himself “on the threshold of what might prove to be a magnificent discovery,” he later recalled. But at the time, even amid the excitement, “one thing puzzled me,” Carter wrote, “and that was the smallness of the opening in comparison with the ordinary Valley tombs.” In the years that followed, Carter and his fellow researchers would make their way to the antechamber, which was filled with hundreds of treasures, and the burial chamber, where the mummified pharaoh himself rested inside three nested coffins. But none of these magnificent discoveries explained the tomb’s diminutive size.

In 2015, a new theory emerged: What if the ancient Egyptians had built the complex, known as KV62, for Queen Nefertiti before converting some of its outer rooms into a tomb for Tutankhamun? And if so, could her tomb be located in a still-unexplored chamber beyond the rooms excavated in the 1920s? Now, a decade later, researchers have conducted new geophysical surveys using techniques such as ground-penetrating radar and microgravimetry.

The results, published this month in the Occasional Papers of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project, provide new evidence that additional rooms may be concealed beyond Tutankhamun’s. If the team’s theory is correct, “it could potentially rank among the most transformative archaeological discoveries of the modern era.” Tutankhamun ascended to power circa 1333 B.C.E., when he was only 9, but his reign ended with his untimely death about a decade later. Meanwhile, Nefertiti’s story is still a matter of debate.

She was a wife of the pharaoh Akhenaten, likely Tutankhamun’s father, and she may have been the boy’s stepmother. Some historians argue that she served a brief stint as a pharaoh herself. The location of her tomb has been a longstanding mystery.

The idea that the queen’s tomb might be hiding beyond Tutankhamun’s was the brainchild of Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist and co-author of the new study. In a 2015 paper, he pointed to scans of the tomb’s walls, which suggested that traces of “two hitherto unrecognized doorways” might be hiding beneath the paint. Reeves argued that the Egyptians weren’t prepared for Tutankhamun to die at such a young age.

As such, they may have interred him in the outer chambers of the burial complex belonging to Nefertiti. Since then, research has found conflicting evidence for this theory. But some of these investigations had been searching for “a large void immediately behind the wall,” Nature’s Jo Marchant writes.