http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/is-nefertiti-in-tuts-tomb?mbid=nl_081715_Daily_Text&CNDID=29175263&spMailingID=7992050&spUserID=NTc0ODkxMjIyOTkS1&spJobID=742105119&spReportId=NzQyMTA1MTE5S0
Is Nefertiti in Tut's Tomb?
By Amy Davidson
On the north wall of the burial chamber of a tomb known as KV-62, in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, there is a mural in which a dead pharaoh is depicted with a living one, who is performing a ceremony known as the Opening of the Mouth, meant to revive the pharaoh in the afterlife. The pharaohs' names are painted in cartouches above the images—they are Tutankhamun, who reigned from about 1332 to 1323 B.C., and his successor, Ay. Tut was laid to rest in a sarcophagus placed in a gold-masked coffin next to the mural. (Ay, whose brief reign brought about the effective end of the eighteenth dynasty, is elsewhere.) But, last week, Nicholas Reeves, an Egyptologist at the University of Arizona, published a paper arguing that the north wall is, in more than one sense, false. Reeves believes that it is a blind, hiding a secret chamber, and that the painting on it was altered in ancient times to tell a lie about whose tomb this really is. There is, he writes, "powerful evidence that the original owner of Tutankhamun's tomb had in fact been a royal woman." He thinks that he knows which one: Nefertiti, and he suspects that her body is still lying behind the wall.
"The reason I come to Nefertiti is not by chance," Reeves told me by phone from the United Kingdom. The tomb of Nefertiti, who is known throughout the world on account of the transfixingly beautiful sculpture of her head in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, has never been found, despite some embarrassingly hyped claims. Reeves says that he discovered its location on a computer screen. A few years ago, Factum Arte, a Spanish architectural design firm, took ultra-high-resolution scans of its every surface of Tutankhamun's tomb, as part of a project to build a facsimile of the space for tourists, and put them online. You can see each flake of paint—more clearly, really, than if you stood inches away. You can also view it in pure black and white, without distracting colors. Reeves stared at the scans for months. He became convinced that he saw the outlines of two doors—"ghosts" emerging from the plaster, which had previously been believed to hide only bare stone. One outline, in the west wall—"very neat and tidy, a nice little doorway"—was the same size as and located symmetrically in relation to a known door in the tomb, which seemed too much to ascribe to coincidence. The other was in the painted north wall. (If you look hard, you can see them, which may be a testament to suggestibility, or to our capacity to miss the obvious.)