Tomb Could Be That of Tutankhamun’s Wife and Egyptian Leading Lady Ankhesenamun

Ancient Origins

Egyptologists believe they may be on the verge of a major discovery related to a leading lady of ancient Egypt. A new tomb found in the Valley of the Kings may have been created as the final resting place for the famous Egyptian queen Ankhesenamun – wife of Tutankhamun.

Live Science reports that the researchers were tipped off to the tomb’s existence by the discovery of four foundation deposits which Zahi Hawass described as “caches or holes in the ground that were filled with votive objects such as pottery vessels, food remains and other tools as a sign that a tomb construction is being initiated.”

According to a National Geographic interview, the researchers were examining the site between February and May. Hawass said a follow-up examination using radar showed “a substructure that could be the entrance of a tomb.”

Valley of the Kings, Luxor, Egypt. (Wouter Hagens/CC BY SA 3.0)

Although nothing has been confirmed yet, Hawass proposes that the tomb’s owner could have been Ankhesenamun. This idea is based on the location near Pharaoh Ay’s tomb.

Ankhesenamun was a longstanding member of ancient Egyptian royalty. Her story begins as the third of six daughters to Pharaoh Akhenaten and his Great Royal Wife Nefertiti. Ankhesenamun married her half-brother Tutankhamun when he was just 8 to 10 years old and she was 13. It is said the couple had stillborn twins. She may have also been briefly married to Tutankhamun's successor, Ay, (believed by many to be her maternal grandfather). There have also been suggestions that Ankhesenamun may have been married to her father for a time as well.

Detail; gold plate depicting Pharaoh Tutankhamun and consort, Ankhesenamun. (CC BY SA 3.0)

This may be shocking for people today, but it was a rather common practice for the royals of ancient Egypt. As April Holloway explains:

“Marriage within family was not uncommon in ancient Egypt and was practiced among royalty as a means of perpetuating the royal lineage. The pharaohs believed they were descended from the gods and incest was seen as acceptable so as to retain the sacred bloodline. However, what they were unaware of at the time was the severe consequences of family inbreeding.”

Detail; Tutankhamun receives flowers from Ankhesenamun as a sign of love. (Public Domain)

Proof for Ay and Ankhesenamun’s marriage has been offered in the form of a finger-ring that was found by Professor Percy Newberry in an antique shop in Cairo in the spring of 1931. It had cartouches of Ay and Ankhesenamun inscribed side by side―which many scholars say is proof of wedlock.

Although the possibility of finding Ankhesenamun’s lost tomb is exciting, it is also worth noting that there is an argument against a marriage between Ay and Ankhesenamun. “Her name never appeared within his tomb and it is believed that she may have died during or shortly after Ay’s reign, as she disappears from history shortly after his period.” If this is true, the tomb near KV23 may have nothing to do with Ankhesenamun.

Portrait study thought to be of Ay from the studio of the sculptor Thutmose. (CC BY SA 3.0) 

To date, it is not known where exactly Ankhesenamun was buried and no funerary objects with her name are known to exist. However, back in 2010 it was proposed that a mummy found in KV21A was Ankhesenamun. As Ancient Origins reported “Although her remains are headless and mostly destroyed, it was possible to use her DNA to confirm that this woman is the mother of two of Tutankhamun’s children.” These results have been debated, but do not discount her as the new tomb’s owner either. Moving mummies was another common practice by ancient priests looking to save them from looters.

It seems that you’ll have to wait to discover who the tomb’s owner is until a much later date. Hawass, who is currently the Director of the Italian expedition in the Valley of the Kings, told Live Science he will oversee future excavations at the site; but no expected start date has been provided for the dig.

Top Image: Ankhesenamun Hands Tutankhamun an Arrow. Source: Asaf Braverman/CC BY NC SA 2.0

By Alicia McDermott

A Tough Commute: Long Hike to Work in the Valley of the Kings Caused Laborers to Suffer from Arthritis

Ancient Origins

In the ancient world, work was so hard that bone pathologies show up in skeletal remains even to this day. In ancient Egypt’s Valley of the Kings, workers labored hard to build the mortuary temples and complexes to pharaohs and other high officials, but they also worked hard just hiking to the job site that their legs show osteoarthritis, a new study says. Anne Austin, an osteologist and Egyptologist at California’s Stanford University in Palo Alto, has separated the jumbled-up bones of the workers in robbed tombs beside the village of Deir el-Medina in Egypt.

 Deir el-Medina, once known as Set Maat (“The Place of Truth”) is located on the west bank of the Nile, across the river from modern-day Luxor. It was a grueling hour's climb for the workers, across the mountainside that looms above Egypt's Valley of the Kings. The village may have been built apart from the wider population in order to preserve secrecy in view of the sensitive nature of the work carried out in the tombs.

The ancient village of Deir el-Medina (Public Domain) Ms Austin determined the people’s sexes and ages from the recovered bones, and analyzed them for symptoms of osteoarthritis, which causes stiffness and pain, says a story about her research in Science online. Ms. Austin’s findings have been published in the International Journal of Osteoarchaeology.

She says the bones that appear to be from men show signs of more osteoarthritis in the ankles and knees than the bones of the women from the cemetery.

The Science story reports: The location of the disease, and its higher occurrence among men, struck Austin as odd. Although the artisans' work in the Valley of the Kings was hard—involving digging, carving, and painting in the rock-cut royal tombs that descend into the Theban hills—this would mainly affect the upper body, not the knees and ankles.

A Tough Commute
Based on 3,500-year-old carved inscriptions detailing daily life, the archaeological record and her observations of the hiking distance, the women remained in the village. But the male workers walked over 2 kilometers (1.242 miles) from the village to their workplace in the Theban Hills on the west bank of the Nile River every week. From their stone huts, the men hiked downhill 93 meters (305 feet) to the valley where they worked on the tombs. At the end of the day, they hiked uphill 93 meters, a rise of 151 meters (494 feet), to the stone huts. These huts are still there to this day. The climb was steep and many of the workers made the hike week after week for years. These workers and artisans cut out sections of rock and then decorated them, carving and painting royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings, the resting place of the New Kingdom pharaohs.

Back-Breaking Work
But Deir el-Medina wasn’t the only place where workers suffered. In 2015, Ancient Origins reported on Akhenaten’s iconoclastic revolution of around 1330 BC and how it affected workers at Amarna. The work at Amarna went on somewhat after the time of Ms. Austin’s Valley of the Kings. When Pharaoh Akhenaten ordered the construction of the new city of Amarna dedicated to the sun god Aten, more than 20,000 people moved there to do the back-breaking work. The work was so strenuous that it resulted in numerous broken bones, including many fractured spinal bones, according to a recent study by archaeologists who examined skeletal remains from a commoners’ cemetery at Amarna.

Akhenaten, Nefertiti and their children bask in the rays of the sun, Aten, a god that Akhenaten raised above all others. (Photo by Andreas Praefcke/ Wikimedia Commons )

The team of archaeologists, who published their work in the journal Antiquity, examined skeletons with more than 50 percent of the bones remaining and found that in addition to probably work-related fractures and degenerative joint disease, the workers also had smaller-than-average stature suggesting lifelong malnutrition and other hardships. Medical Treatment, Prayers and Magic This is not the first work Ms. Austin has done at Deir el-Medina, and her work shows while the artisans may have suffered from osteoarthritis in their lower limbs, they also may have had recourse to treatment.

As Ancient Origins reported in 2014, as in other Egyptian communities, the workmen and inhabitants of Deir el-Medina received care for their health problems through medical treatment, prayer and magic. The records at Deir el-Medina, for example, note both a “physician,” who saw patients and prescribed treatments; and a “scorpion charmer,” who specialized in magical cures for scorpion bites. Archaeologists even recovered an ancient prosthetic toe, which would have enabled a worker with a missing toe to continue working.

Prosthetic toe from the commoners’ cemetery at Deir el-Medina of ancient Egypt, now in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The big toe is carved from wood and is attached to the foot by a sewn leather wrapping. ( Wikipedia)

 Top image: The ancient village of Deir el-Medina ( Wikimedia)

By Mark Miller

8 things you (probably) didn’t know about Tutankhamun

History Extra

Golden funeral mask of Tutankhamun. Egyptian National Museum, Cairo. (Photo by Leemage/Corbis via Getty Images)

1) His original name was not Tutankhamun

Tutankhamun was originally named Tutankhaten. This name, which literally means “living image of the Aten”, reflected the fact that Tutankhaten’s parents worshipped a sun god known as “the Aten”. After a few years on the throne the young king changed his religion, abandoned the Aten, and started to worship the god Amun [who was revered as king of the gods]. This caused him to change his name to Tutankhamun, or “living image of Amun”.
Tutankhamun was not, however, the name by which his people knew him. Like all of Egypt’s kings, Tutankhamun actually had five royal names. These took the form of short sentences that outlined the focus of his reign. Officially, he was:
(1) Horus Name: Image of births
(2) Two Ladies Name: Beautiful of laws who quells the Two Lands/who makes content all the gods
(3) Golden Horus Name: Elevated of appearances for the god/his father Re
(4) Prenomen: Nebkheperure
(5) Nomen: Tutankhamun
His last two names, known today as the prenomen and the nomen, are the names that we see written in cartouches (oval loops) on his monuments. We know him by his nomen, Tutankhamun. His people, however, knew him by his prenomen, Nebkheperure, which literally translates as “[the sun god] Re is the lord of manifestations”.

2) Tutankhamun has the smallest royal tomb in the Valley of the Kings

The first pharaohs built highly conspicuous pyramids in Egypt’s northern deserts. However, by the time of the New Kingdom (1550–1069 BC), this fashion had ended. Most kings were now buried in relative secrecy in rock-cut tombs tunnelled into the Valley of the Kings on the west bank of the Nile at the southern city of Thebes (modern-day Luxor). These tombs had inconspicuous doors, but were both spacious and well decorated inside.
Cemeteries carried their own potent magic, and dead kings were thought to have powerful spirits that might benefit others. Burial amongst his ancestors would have helped Tutankhamun to achieve his own afterlife. It therefore seems likely that Tutankhamun would have wished to be buried in a splendid tomb in either the main valley or in an offshoot, the Western Valley, where his grandfather, Amenhotep III, was buried. But, whatever he may have had intended, we know that Tutankhamun was actually buried in a cramped tomb cut into the floor of the main valley.
It may be that Tutankhamun simply died too young to complete his ambitious plans. His own tomb was unfinished, and so he had to be buried in a substitute, non-royal tomb. However, this seems unlikely, as other kings managed to build suitable tombs in just two or three years. It seems far more likely that Tutankhamun’s successor, Ay, a king who inherited the throne as an elderly man, made a strategic swap. Just four years after Tutankhamun’s death, Ay himself was buried in a splendid tomb in the Western Valley, close by the tomb of Amenhotep III.
The unexpectedly small size of Tutankhamun’s tomb has led to recent suggestions that there may be parts as yet undiscovered. Currently Egyptologists are investigating the possibility that there may be secret chambers hidden behind the plastered wall of his burial chamber.

_{British archaeologist and Egyptologist Howard Carter (left) and his assistant Arthur Callender opening the entrance to Tutankhamun's tomb, 1922. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)}

 

3) He was buried in a second-hand coffin

Tutankhamun’s mummy lay within a nest of three golden coffins, which fitted snugly one inside another like a set of Russian dolls. During the funeral ritual the combined coffins were placed in a rectangular stone sarcophagus. Unfortunately, the outer coffin proved to be slightly too big, and its toes peeked over the edge of the sarcophagus, preventing the lid from closing. Carpenters were quickly summoned and the coffin’s toes were cut away. More than 3,000 years later Howard Carter would find the fragments lying in the base of the sarcophagus.
All three of Tutankhamun’s coffins were similar in style: they were “anthropoid”, or human-form coffins, shaped to look like the god of the dead, Osiris, lying on his back and holding the crook and flail in his crossed arms. But the middle coffin had a slightly different style and its face did not look like the faces on other two coffins. Nor did it look like the face on Tutankhamun’s death mask.  Many Egyptologists now believe that this middle coffin – along with some of Tutankhamun’s other grave goods – was originally made for the mysterious “Neferneferuaten” – an enigmatic individual whose name is recorded in inscriptions and who may have been Tutankhamun’s immediate predecessor. We do not know what happened to Neferneferuaten, nor how Tutankhamun came to be buried in his or her coffin.
_{Howard Carter removing oils from the coffin of Tutankhamun, 1922. (Photo by Mansell/Mansell/The LIFE Picture Collection/Getty Images)}

4) Tutankhamun loved to hunt ostriches

Tutankhamun’s ostrich-feather fan was discovered lying in his burial chamber, close by the king’s body. Originally the fan consisted of a long golden handle topped by a semi-circular ‘palm’ that supported 42 alternating brown and white feathers. These feathers crumbled away long ago, but their story is preserved in writing on the fan handle. This tells us that that the feathers were taken from ostriches captured by the king himself while hunting in the desert to the east of Heliopolis (near modern-day Cairo). The embossed scene on the palm shows, on one face, Tutankhamun setting off in his chariot to hunt ostrich, and on the reverse, the king returning in triumph with his prey.
Ostriches were important birds in ancient Egypt, and their feathers and eggs were prized as luxury items. Hunting ostriches was a royal sport that allowed the king to demonstrate his control over nature. It was a substitute for battle and, as such, was a dangerous occupation. We can see that Tutankhamun’s body was badly damaged before he was mummified. Is the placement of his ostrich fan so close to his body significant? Is this, perhaps, someone’s way of telling us that the young king died following a fatal accident on an ostrich hunt?
_{Howard Carter (left) and Arthur Callender systematically remove objects from the antechamber of the tomb of Tutankhamun with the assistance of an Egyptian labourer. (Photo by Hulton Archive/Getty Images)}

 

5) His heart is missing

The ancient Egyptians believed that it was possible to live again after death, but thought that this could only be achieved if the body was preserved in a lifelike condition. This led them to develop the science of artificial mummification.
Essentially, mummification involved desiccating the body in natron salt, then wrapping it in many layers of bandages to preserve a lifelike shape. The body’s internal organs were removed at the start of the mummification process and preserved separately. The brain, its function then unknown, was simply thrown away – the heart, rather than the brain, was regarded as the organ of reasoning. As such, the heart would be required in the afterlife. It was therefore left in place and, if accidentally removed, immediately sewn back; though not always in its original location.
Tutankhamun, however, has no heart. Instead he was provided with an amuletic scarab inscribed with a funerary spell. This may have happened simply because the undertakers were careless, but it could also be a sign that Tutankhamun died far from home. By the time his body arrived at the undertakers’ workshop, his heart may have been too decayed to be preserved.

_{The mask of Tutankhamun, seen at the British Museum, London, January 1972. (Photo by Kean Collection/Getty Images)}

 

6) One of Tutankhamun’s favourite possessions was an iron dagger

Howard Carter discovered two daggers carefully wrapped inside Tutankhamun’s mummy bandages. One dagger had a gold blade, while the other had a blade made of iron. Each dagger had a gold sheath. Of the two, the iron dagger was by far the more valuable because, during Tutankhamun’s lifetime (he reigned from c1336–27 BC), iron, or “iron from the sky” as it was known, was a rare and precious metal. As its name suggests, Egypt’s “iron from the sky” was almost entirely obtained from meteorites.
Several other iron objects were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb: 16 miniature blades, a tiny headrest and an amulet. The fact that these pieces are not particularly well made, combined with their small size, suggest that they were made by local craftsmen who struggled to work the rare meteorite iron. The dagger blade, however, is very different. Beautifully crafted, it is likely to have been imported to Egypt from a region accustomed to working iron. The royal diplomatic archives tell us that, several years before Tutankhamun’s birth, king Tushratta of Mitanni sent a metal dagger to Egypt as a gift to his new son-in-law, Amenhotep III. Given the rarity of good quality iron artefacts at this time, it is possible that Amenhotep’s dagger was inherited by his grandson, Tutankhamun, and eventually buried with him. Given its prominent location within the mummy bandages, it may even be that Tushratta’s dagger was used in Tutankhamun’s mummification ritual.
_{Tutankhamun’s daggers, one with a blade of gold, the other of iron. (Robert Harding/Alamy Stock Photo)}

7) His trumpets have entertained an audience of more than 150 million

Tutankhamun’s grave goods included a small collection of musical instruments: one pair of ivory clappers, two sistra (rattles) and two trumpets, one made from silver with a gold mouthpiece and the other made of bronze partially overlaid by gold. This would not have made a very satisfactory orchestra, and it seems that music was not high on Tutankhamun’s list of priorities for his afterlife. In fact, his trumpets should more properly be classified as military equipment, while his clappers and sistra are likely to have had a ritual purpose.
On 16 April 1939, the two trumpets were played in a BBC live radio broadcast from Cairo Museum, which reached an estimated 150 million listeners. Bandsman James Tappern used a modern mouthpiece, which caused damage to the silver trumpet. In 1941 the bronze trumpet was played again, this time without a modern mouthpiece.
Some, influenced by the myth of “Tutankhamun’s curse”, have claimed that the trumpets have the power to summon war. They have suggested that it was the 1939 broadcast which caused Britain to enter the Second World War.
To listen to a clip of the broadcast, click here.

8) Tutankhamun was buried in the world’s most expensive coffin

Two of Tutankhamun’s three coffins were made of wood, covered with gold sheet. But, to Howard Carter’s great surprise, the innermost coffin was made from thick sheets of beaten gold. This coffin measures 1.88m in length, and weighs 110.4kg. If it were to be scrapped today it would be worth well over £1m. But as Tutankhamun’s final resting place it is, of course, priceless.
Joyce Tyldesley teaches a suite of online courses in Egyptology at the University of Manchester. She is the author of Tutankhamen’s Curse: the Developing History of an Egyptian King (Profile 2012).

Egyptologists Set to Unravel the Identity of Mystery Pharaoh from Tomb KV55

Ancient Origins

An ancient Eygptian tomb excavated in 1907 still holds mysteries. Chief among them: Who exactly was buried there? Was it Akhenaten, a radical pharaoh who overturned all the Egyptians knew about their many deities and elevated one “true” god above all others—Aten? A new study will explore this question and try to answer once and for all who was the occupant of the mystery sarcophagus in tomb KV55 of the Valley of Kings.

No one has ever presented any definitive evidence that the sarcophagus had contained Akhenaten’s remains, AhramOnline quotes Elham Salah, head of the Antiquities Ministry’s Museums Department, as saying. Dr. Salah added that the sarcophagus is one of the most controversial among Egypt’s many known ancient burials.

Bust of Pharaoh Akhenaton (Wikimedia Commons)

The Ministry of Antiquities will continue a study of the sarcophagus begun in 2015 with help of a $28,500 grant from the American Research Center in Egypt.
“Salah … told Ahram Online that the study is being carried out on a collection of 500 gold sheets found in a box in storage at the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir along with the remains of a skull and a handwritten note in French,” the newspaper states.

Pieces of the skull found in the sarcophagus in KV55 (AhramOnline photo)

The note dates to the opening of KV55. It says the 500 gold sheets were in a sarcophagus in the tomb, but doesn’t specify which sarcophagus, AhramOnline states. The initial phase of the study determined the gold sheets could have been in sarcophagus in question.

The gold sheets that were in a sarcophagus in the tomb (Photo by AhramOnline)

Islam Ezat, a staffer with the ministry’s scientific office, said the study is being done by skilled Egyptian archaeologists and restorers. He told AhramOnline the study may answer once and for all who the owner of the sarcophagus and tomb was.
KV55 contained a variety of artifacts and a single body, as Ancient Origins reported in January 2015. Identification of the body has been complicated by the fact that the artifacts appear to belong to several different individuals. It has been speculated that the tomb was created in a hurry, and that the individual buried there had been previously laid to rest elsewhere. With many different possibilities for the identity of the mummy – ranging from Queen Tiye (Akhenaten’s mother), to King Smenkhkare – researchers who set out to identify the mummy were presented with a puzzling challenge.
In January 1907, financier Theodore M. Davis hired archaeologist Edward R. Ayrton and his team to conduct excavations in the Valley of the Kings in Egypt. The Valley of the Kings is an area in Egypt located on the West bank of the Nile River, across from the city of Thebes. Almost all of the pharaohs from Egypt’s Golden Age are buried in this famous valley.
The KV55 tomb is small and simple. The entrance includes a flight of 20 stairs. At the time of the discovery, the entrance and stairs were covered by rubble. A sloping corridor leads to the tomb, which contains a single chamber and a small niche. Within the tomb, at the time of discovery, were four canopic jars, a gilded wooden shrine, remains of boxes, seal impressions and a vase stand. It also had pieces of furniture, a silver goose head, two clay bricks, and a single coffin. The coffin had been desecrated, with parts of the beautifully decorated face having been removed.

One of the four Egyptian alabaster canopic jars found in KV55, depicting what is thought to be the likeness of Queen Kiya. Wikimedia, CC BY-SA 2.5

Overall, the physical appearance of the tomb is unremarkable. However, the contents became more puzzling and mysterious as they were examined, as each piece appeared to be connected to different individuals. This made efforts to identify the remains within the tomb more difficult. According to some researchers, the presence of this variety of items indicates that whoever was entombed here was done so in a hurry, or possibly the individual was buried somewhere else, and then relocated to KV55 at a later date.
While identifying the remains in the tomb has been challenging, there are many clues in the items found within the tomb. Many of these items have been linked to King Akhenaten. The four canopic jars within the tomb were all empty. They contained effigies of four women, believed to be the daughters of Akhenaten, and may have been created for Kiya, one of Akhenaten’s wives. The gilded shrine appeared to have been created for Akhenaten’s mother, Queen Tiye. And Akhenaten’s name was on the two clay bricks.

Profile view of a skull recovered from KV55. Public Domain

In 2010, some experts had concluded they were nearly certain the remains were of Akhenaten, but the identity is now being studied further.
Featured image: The desecrated royal coffin found in Tomb KV55. Wikimedia, CC BY 2.0
By Mark Miller

The Elusive Tomb of Queen Nefertiti may lie behind the walls of Tutankhamun's Burial Chamber

An archaeologist studying electronic scans of the walls of the ancient Egyptian King Tutankhamun's tomb thinks he has found a false wall that may lead to the tomb of Nefertiti, the famous successor to Akhenaten and the probable mother of Tutankhamun. The location of Nefertiti's tomb has been one of Egyptology’s biggest mysteries, and archaeologist Nicholas Reeves thinks further exploration behind the walls of King Tutankhamun's tomb at the Amarna Royal Tombs in the Valley of Kings is warranted.

“Cautious evaluation of the Factum Arte scans over the course of several months has yielded results which are beyond intriguing: indications of two previously unknown doorways, one set within a larger partition wall and both seemingly untouched since antiquity,” writes Reeves in a new paper on his study of the scans. “The implications are extraordinary: for, if digital appearance translates into physical reality, it seems we are now faced not merely with the prospect of a new, Tutankhamun-era storeroom to the west; to the north appears to be signalled a continuation of tomb KV 62 and within these uncharted depths an earlier royal interment—that of Nefertiti herself, celebrated consort, co-regent, and eventual successor of pharaoh Akhenaten.”

The Wilbour Plaque, Brooklyn Museum. Nefertiti is shown nearly as large as her husband, indicating her importance. Image source: Brooklyn Museum.

The paintings on the walls of King Tutankhamun's burial chamber, which Factum Arte scanned and which the University of Arizona's Reeves studied, obscure the surface. But Reeves says there are telltale signs in the cracks and fissures of the wall that may indicate rooms behind the walls, which have been assumed to be solid limestone.

Howard Carter found Tutankhamun's tomb intact in 1922 with more than 5,000 artifacts.

The paintings within this [burial chamber] room document the principal stages in Tutankhamun's physical and spiritual transition from this world to the realm of the gods. Although affected by serious mould growth, these painted surfaces remain both sound and intact. Covering as they do virtually every inch of the walls, the underlying architecture is almost wholly obscured. Carter, followed by all Egyptologists since, seems to have accepted that beneath lay only bedrock, influenced in this understanding by the fact that four eccentrically placed amulet emplacements cut through the decoration to expose solid limestone.

• The Mysterious Disappearance of Nefertiti, Ruler of the Nile
• The Quest to find Nefertiti, Queen of the Nile
• Pharaoh Akhenaten
• The Art of Amarna: Akhenaten and his life under the Sun

Screenshot from a Factum Arte scan of King Tutankhamun's burial chamber, behind which, a researcher says, may lie the tomb of Queen Nefertiti. (Factum-arte.org scan)

Reeves posits that when Tutankhamun died in 1332 BC, his tomb displaced part of Nefertiti's tomb and assumed some of her burial goods and space because of his untimely and unexpected death. Further, though he says it can't be proven yet, he speculates Nefertiti herself “will have inherited, adapted, and employed the full, formal burial equipment originally produced for Akhenaten.”

Though King Tutankamun's tomb was richly decorated and appointed, it was small for a king. Reeves says it may be an extension of Nefertiti's larger tomb.

Nefertiti is one of the most famous queens of ancient Egypt, second only to Cleopatra. While many aspects of her life are well-documented, there are many mysteries surrounding her death and burial. While hundreds of royal mummies have already been recovered in Egypt, Nefertiti’s mummy has remained elusive.

Theban Mapping Project's diagram of King Tutankamun's known tomb, in gray, and two possible new rooms in yellow and red, one of which, a researcher says, cold be Queen Nefertiti's burial chamber.

Neferneferuaten Nefertiti lived from 1370 BC until 1340 BC. She was married to the Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten, who gave her many titles, including: Great Royal Wife, Hereditary Princess, Great of Praises, Lady of Grace, Sweet of Love, Lady of The Two Lands, Great King’s Wife, Lady of all Women, and Mistress of Upper and Lower Egypt. Nefertiti was known for being very beautiful, and her name means “the beautiful one has come.” While little is known about Nefertiti’s origins, it is believed that she was from an Egyptian town known as Akhmim and was closely related to a high official named Ay. Others believe Nefertiti came from a foreign country.

In an interview with The Economist, Reeves said: “If I’m wrong, I’m wrong; but if I’m right this is potentially the biggest archaeological discovery ever made.”

Featured image:  The iconic bust of Nefertiti, discovered by Ludwig Borchardt, is part of the Ägyptisches Museum Berlin collection, currently on display in the Altes Museum. Image Source.

By Mark Miller

Ancient Origins