New radar scans have provided conclusive evidence that there are no hidden rooms inside King Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, Egypt’s antiquities ministry said on Sunday, bringing a disappointing end to years of excitement over the prospect.
At one point officials had said they were 90 percent certain of a secret room behind the boy king’s 3000-year-old resting place, sparking feverish speculation it might contain the tomb of his step-mother Queen Nefertiti.
But 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.
"Our work shows in a conclusive manner that there are no hidden chambers, no corridors adjacent to Tutankhamun’s tomb," Dr Porcelli said, "As you know there was a theory that argued the possible existence of these chambers but unfortunately our work is not supporting this theory."
Getty Images
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.
It was suggested that the tomb may originally have been intended for her alone, and that Tutankhamun, who died at the age of just 19, was hastily buried in an ante-chamber of her final resting place.
Nefertiti’s resting place is one of the most enduring mysteries in Egyptology. Scholars have debated her fate for more than a century. Some believe she was buried in Amarna, an ancient capital city founded by Pharaoh Akhenaten.
The claims of a secret chamber ignited global interest, as officials first rushed to support the new theory but then later distanced themselves before ultimately rejecting it.
During the conference, Antiquities Minister Khaled al-Anani said that the first phase of the new museum, including King Tut’s halls, will be completed by the end of this year but the date for the museum’s "soft opening" has yet to be decided.
The museum currently hosts more than 43,200 artifacts of which over 4,500 belong to King Tut alone, and its grand opening is planned for 2022.
Click Here: cheap nsw blues jersey