But Damaty says that scans indicate that there nearly certainly is some type of hidden chamber behind the wall of the tomb in the Valley of the Kings.
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At a news conference in Luxor, Egypt’s Antiquities Minister Mamdouh el-Damaty says researchers have boosted their level of certainty about a hidden chamber from 60 percent to 90 percent.
“I’m feeling more certain today than I expected to be”, he said outside the Howard Carter House, a site named after the British archaeologist propelled to worldwide celebrity for his discovery of the Tutankhamun tomb in 1922.
One archaeologist has speculated that if the second chamber exists, it could be Queen Nefertiti’s long-lost burial place.
“The radar, behind the north wall (of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber) seems pretty clear”.
“I think it is Nefertiti and all the evidence points in that direction”.
“Boy king”… King Tut died at just 19, nine years after ascending to the throne.
“If I’m wrong, I’m wrong”, Reeves has previously said of his theory.
Investigators used radar to confirm a theory by British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves, a professor of archaeology at the University of Arizona, that the boy king’s tomb extended farther than initially believed.
Reeves’s claim about Nefertiti being the occupant of the secret crypt left several experts more than skeptical.
Speculation about Nefertiti’s burial place has continued ever since.
The antiquities minister and Reeves have different views on whose mummy they expect to find inside the tomb.
More recently, most experts, including Reeves, have come to believe that she outlived Akhenaten, who may have been Tut’s father, but changed her name and may have briefly ruled Egypt. In 1898, archeologists thought they found Nefertiti’s remains in the Valley of the Kings but it has never been proven.
The findings could even stir up old rumors about the “curse of the pharaohs”, which is believed to haunt those who disturb ancient Egyptian tombs.
“The lady was worshipping Aton with Akhenaten for years”. The religion they created was labeled heresy by subsequent pharaohs, and some experts have said that would have precluded her burial in the Valley of the Kings.
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Hawass, meanwhile, also questioned how archaeologists would enter the hidden part of the tomb without causing damage. Further analysis will be required over the next month, but the ministry said there was hope that “an enormous archaeological discovery will be declared soon”.
