For more than a century, Tutankhamun’s tomb has seemed to hold one last secret. When Howard Carter entered it in 1922, he found an extraordinarily small burial chamber for a pharaoh, which fueled a question that still remains open: Was that tomb really the one that had been built for the young king? Now, a new archaeogeophysical study, published in Academia, maintains that under the rock located north of KV62 there could be a funerary complex made up of several chambers and corridors. And a possibility is gaining strength again: that Nefertiti’s tomb is located there.
The hypothesis is not new. In 2015, British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves proposed that KV62 had originally been built for an 18th Dynasty queen and that, following Tutankhamun’s untimely death, only part of the complex would have been adapted for burial. The decorated walls of the funerary chamber would show, according to this interpretation, signs of having hidden access to deeper spaces. Nefertiti, whose tomb and remains have never been identified, then became the leading candidate.
Since then, different teams have tried to look behind those walls without having to open them. Ground-penetrating radar, electrical resistivity tomography, and thermography provided conflicting results. A study published in 2019, for example, concluded that there was no evidence of hidden cameras immediately adjacent to KV62.
The new study, led by Egyptologist Mamdouh Eldamaty, from Ain Shams University in Cairo, together with Abbas Mohamed Abbas, George Ballard, Nicholas Reeves and other specialists, attempts to resolve these discrepancies by combining the data from previous research with two new campaigns carried out in 2023 and 2024. The fundamental novelty is in microgravimetry, a technique capable of detecting minute variations in the gravitational field caused by differences in the density of the subsoil. A cavity, a debris-filled corridor, and solid rock do not weigh exactly the same from the point of view of a gravimetric measurement. The authors crossed these measurements with radar, electrical resistivity, geological cartography and the analysis of the tomb’s own architecture. The result, according to his interpretation, is difficult to attribute simply to chance or natural geology.
“Our data allow us to identify with high probability the presence of a funerary complex of an easily recognizable type that extends between 25 and 30 meters north of KV 62 – the study points out -. It is likely that there are five or six chambers in this space, and there is a clear expectation that the voids detected connect to each other. and with KV 62 through passages that were deliberately filled with rubble in ancient times.”
The shape of these anomalies is one of the keys. George Ballard, a structural research specialist and co-author of the study, points out that microgravity measurements reveal low-density structures with right angles and orientations parallel to the north wall of the burial chamber. One of them is especially intriguing: a low-density area that contains within it another approximately square structure of higher density. It could correspond, according to Ballard, to a chamber containing objects. But he himself recognizes that they are “at the very limits of detection.”
Here appears the most important part of the story. A geophysical anomaly is not a room and a room is not a tomb. And a tomb, even if it existed, would not prove that it belonged to Nefertiti. The study offers indications of buried artificial structures, but no one has yet opened those spaces. In fact, the authors themselves propose the following step: access from Tutankhamun’s tomb through an extremely controlled drilling that allows a small camera to be introduced. Authorization from the Egyptian authorities has not yet been granted, although the team has requested it and hopes to carry out the inspection later this year.
If intact chambers did appear behind the walls, the find would be extraordinary even if Nefertiti was not there. It could reveal how KV62 was originally designed, why it was modified and who was its first occupant. For the authors of the study, a confirmation of this extension could become one of the most important archaeological discoveries since the discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb itself in 1922 and, potentially, transform our political, religious and dynastic understanding of the Amarna period.
For now, however, Nefertiti remains where she has been for more than three millennia: somewhere we still don’t know. What has changed is that, for the first time, several different techniques appear to be drawing the same map under the mountain. The next look will not have to be done on a painting or on an ancient document, but rather through a small camera that tries to penetrate the stone. And then, perhaps, the mountain stops being a hypothesis and begins to tell what it holds.