The three-day investigation is expected to add new clues to help reveal what Minister of Antiquity Mamdouh al-Damaty called “the discovery of the century.”
“The search will involve the use of radar and infrared thermography,” Damaty told Egypt’s news site Ahram Online.
The new non-invasive probe follows a claim by Nicholas Reeves, a British Egyptologist at the University of Arizona, that high-resolution images of the tomb’s walls show “distinct linear traces” pointing to the presence of two still unexplored chambers behind the western and northern walls of the tomb.
According to Reeves, one chamber contains the remains, and possibly the intact grave goods, of queen Nefertiti, wife of the “heretic” monotheistic pharaoh Akhenaten, Tutankhamun’s father.
Reeves speculated that the tomb of King Tut was not ready when he died unexpectedly at 19 in 1323 B.C., after having ruled a short reign of nine to 10 years. Consequently, he was buried in a rush in what was originally the tomb of Nefertiti, who had died 10 years earlier.
Reeves and Damaty conducted a preliminary visual inspection of the tomb in September. The investigation was followed earlier this month by further tests, carried out by a team from Cairo University’s Faculty of Engineering and the Paris-based organization Heritage, Innovation and Preservation.
The researchers used infrared thermography to detect the temperature of the walls in the tomb.
According to Damaty, the analysis showed “differences in the temperatures registered on different parts of the northern wall” of the tomb.
Read more at Discovery News
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