Archaeologists this month announced the discovery of a hidden tomb in the Valley of the Kings near Luxor, Egypt, the first since King Tutankhamun's was unearthed in 1922. The tantalizing possibility is that the tomb is the long-sought resting place of Queen Nefertiti.
During routine fieldwork, a team led by Otto Schaden, an Egyptologist at the University of Memphis, Tennessee, came upon a 4-meter-deep stone shaft leading to a chamber holding mummies of several adults and a child. The style of the brightly colored sarcophagi dates them to about 1330 B.C.E., says Betsy Bryan, an Egyptologist at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, Maryland. "What is most exciting," adds Bryan, "is [the tomb] offers a glimpse at the strangest period in Egyptian history": the late 18th Dynasty, when the heretical King Akhenaten brought a brief period of sun-worshipping monotheism to Egypt. His wife Nefertiti acted as king after his death. Because Akhenaten's religion considered death final, "one theory is that Nefertiti's body was buried in the Valley of the Kings to make sure she had an afterlife," says Bryan.
Identification of the mummies will be tough. If no writ-ten record is found, Bryan says it might be useful to reconstruct their faces and compare them to an existing bust of the queen. "The tomb is most likely that of an elite but nonroyal group," says Stephen Buckley, an Egyptologist at the University of York, U.K. But even without the queen, he says, it is "an exciting discovery" that will keep researchers busy for years to come.
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