Radar suggests a lost queen may be sealed inside King Tut’s tomb

A new geophysical survey led by Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves points to five or six undiscovered chambers extending 25 to 30 metres north of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, adding fresh data to a decade-old theory that the boy pharaoh’s tomb was built inside, and only partly occupies, a larger burial meant for an Eighteenth Dynasty queen. The findings appeared this week in the Occasional Papers of the Amarna Royal Tombs Project and were reported by the science journal Nature.

Howard Carter discovered Tutankhamun’s tomb, designated KV62, in 1922, and archaeologists have spent a century treating its cramped four-room layout as unusual for a king who ruled Egypt’s Eighteenth Dynasty from around 1333 to 1324 BCE. Reeves first proposed in 2015 that the tomb’s walls hid sealed doorways leading to additional space; the newest survey is the most detailed attempt yet to test that idea with instruments rather than argument.

Nicholas Reeves and the case for a hidden queen’s tomb

Reeves’s original 2015 hypothesis rested on lines he identified beneath the paint of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, which he read as traces of doorways sealed over in antiquity.

Because Tutankhamun died suddenly at 19, the theory holds that workers repurposed and walled off part of an existing tomb rather than building a new one from scratch, either a private burial modified for an emergency royal funeral, or an unfinished queen’s tomb that still holds its intended occupant elsewhere in the same complex. Reeves, an independent Egyptologist, has pursued the theory since first publishing it eleven years ago. The queen at the center of that second scenario is Nefertiti, wife of King Akhenaten and Tutankhamun’s presumed father. Archaeologists have never located her body, and the new study argues that a wall scene inside KV62, showing Tutankhamun’s successor Ay performing the burial rite known as the opening of the mouth ceremony, was originally carved to depict Tutankhamun performing that same rite for his predecessor, identified in the study as Smenkhkare, whom the researchers treat as the same person as Nefertiti.

Nefertiti is one of the most recognizable figures from ancient Egypt largely because of a painted limestone bust housed in Berlin’s Neues Museum, yet no burial site has ever been confirmed for her. If Reeves’s chambers do connect to an intact queen’s burial, it would rank among the most significant funerary discoveries in the Valley of the Kings since Carter’s find of Tutankhamun’s tomb itself, which yielded more than six hundred artifacts crammed into a space researchers already suspected was too small for a reigning king.

The identification of the wall painting hinges partly on facial comparison rather than an inscription naming names. Tutankhamun’s mummified face closely resembles the Nefertiti bust, and the profile of Ay, shown performing the funerary rite, matches a separate statue of Tutankhamun himself, which is the detail that led Reeves’s team to argue the scene was recarved for a new occupant rather than designed for Tutankhamun from the start.

Microgravimetry and ground-penetrating radar readings

Between 2023 and 2024, Reeves’s team ran new surveys combining microgravimetry, which measures tiny changes in underground gravity caused by empty space, with ground-penetrating radar imaging. Earlier radar work had produced conflicting results, including a widely cited 2018 study that found no evidence of large chambers immediately next to the tomb, but the newer combination of methods identified what the researchers describe as a funerary complex of a generally recognizable type extending roughly 25 to 30 metres north of KV62. The team’s report states that five or six chambers likely exist in that space, and that the voids they detected appear connected to each other and to KV62 itself by passageways deliberately filled with rubble in antiquity. That detail matters because it distinguishes the claim from a simple geological gap: a filled passageway implies someone sealed the space on purpose, rather than natural rock simply being absent.

KV62’s floor plan and the next step

One structural clue predates the radar data entirely. Tutankhamun’s burial chamber turns left as visitors move through it, while tombs built for Eighteenth Dynasty kings around the same period consistently turn right. That leftward layout instead matches the unfinished tomb built for Queen Hatshepsut, which is why the study concludes that the floor plan Tutankhamun’s tomb follows belongs to an Eighteenth Dynasty queen rather than a king.

Mamdouh Eldamaty, an Egyptologist at Ain Shams University and a co-author of the study, told Nature that confirming the chambers would rank among the most significant archaeological discoveries of the modern era. The next step, according to the team, is physically accessing one of the theorized chambers, something no radar image or gravity reading can substitute for. Until a drill, a fiber-optic camera, or an excavation permit produces a direct look inside, the five or six chambers north of KV62 remain a strongly supported reading of the data rather than a confirmed find.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors prior to publication.

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