Hidden Rooms in King Tutankhamun's Tomb?

“First of all, we saw that on the ceiling itself there’s a distinct line,” Reeves said, after returning from visiting the tomb with Egyptian archaeologists and officials. He explained that in the room that contains Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus, the line on the ceiling perfectly matches the section of wall that appears to have been plastered over. “It suggests that the room was indeed a corridor,” he said.

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The archaeologists also noticed a marked contrast in the materials that cover different parts of the same wall. “What my Egyptian colleagues discovered is that there is a distinct difference in the surface of the surrounding wall and the central part that would be covering the door,” Reeves said. “The surrounding wall is a softer plastering. At the point where I suspect there’s a doorway, it’s quite gritty.”

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This gritty material matches fragments that originally covered another blocked door opened by Howard Carter in 1922. Carter, who excavated with a meticulousness that was highly unusual for his era, collected the gritty material, and it’s still stored in a side room of the tomb, where Reeves and the others were able to examine it.

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Egypt’s Antiquities Minister, Mamdouh el-Damaty, announced last week that an infrared scan of Tutankhamun's burial chamber shows evidence that a pair of doorways could be hidden behind a layer of plaster and paint, possibly leading to another hidden burial chamber, Mark Strauss reports for National Geographic. According to el-Damaty, “the preliminary analysis indicates the presence of an area different in its temperature than the other parts of the northern wall.”

The scans were prompted by another recent study of digital scans of the room by the archaeologist Nicholas Reeves, which suggested that a series of tiny cracks in the wall might indicate a hidden chamber. Reeves has argued for years that Tutankhamun's tomb was originally built for Nefertiti, who was one of his father Akhenaten’s wives, but her tomb was appropriated for the young king after his sudden death at 19.

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