A secret chamber inside the world’s most famous tomb could reveal the remains of Egypt’s famed Queen Nefertiti. A team of Italian researchers from Polytechnic University Turin will explore King Tutankhamen’s tomb later this month in Egypt’s famed Valley of the Kings, the Washington Post reported.
Scientists have tried three times to find the concealed chamber since 2015. The latest probe into the king’s 3,300-year-old tomb will involve state-of-the-art radar technology able to scan 32 feet of solid rock.
“It will be a rigorous scientific work and will last several days, if not weeks,” Franco Porcelli, the project’s director, told reporters. “Who knows what we might find as we scan the ground.”
The discovery could bolster Egypt’s sagging tourism sector. Political turmoil and terrrorism, including the bombing of a Russian charter flight that killed 224 people in 2015 near the resort town of Sharm el-Sheikh have scared many international visitors away in recent years.
“We do not know if the burial chamber is Nefertiti or another woman, but it is full of treasures,” Egypt’s tourism minister, Hisham Zaazou, told ABC, a Spanish national newspaper. “It will be a ‘Big Bang’ — the discovery of the 21st century.”
In 2015, British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves was the first to claim a secret chamber in the tomb would reveal Queen Nefertiti’s grave. Inital radar scans showed the tomb housed two chambers on the northern and eastern walls, but a later scan completed by the National Geographic Society did not find the hidden chamber.
“This will be the final investigation,” Porcelli said of the upcoming probe. “We will provide an answer which is 99 percent definitive.”
Queen Nefertiti was married to King Tut’s father, the pharaoh Akhenaten, and was the boy king’s stepmother.
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