Egypt’s Antiquities Ministry says archaeologists are starting radar scans of the tomb of famed pharaoh Tutankhamun in the southern city of Luxor.
The ministry said the scans will be carried out over a week to check for the existence of any hidden chambers behind the tomb.
Egypt carried out previous scans as part of the quest but the findings were inconclusive.
At the time, he said one of the secret rooms could be the burial place of the Pharaoh’s stepmother Queen Neferтιтi.
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The tomb of King Tut, who ruled Egypt more than 3,000 years ago, was discovered in 1922 in the Valley of the Kings, located on the west bank of the Nile river in Luxor.
For many, Tut embodies ancient Egypt’s glory because his tomb was packed with the glittering wealth of the rich 18th Dynasty, which ruled from 1569 to 1315 BC.
Researchers are using ground penetrating radar (GPR) to scan the pharaoh’s chamber for the existence of two chambers rumoured to be hidden behind its walls.
The search is being led by the Polytechnic University Turin, Italy, and will be the third time in the past two years researchers have looked for the lost chamber.
“I’m privileged to be given this opportunity, and I’m privileged to be coordinating such a great team,” Professor Franco Porcelli, the project’s director and a physics researchers at the Polytechnic University in Turin, told National Geographic in an exclusive interview.
He told Seeker last year: ‘It will be a rigorous scientific work and will last several days, if not weeks.
‘Three radar systems will be used and frequencies from 200 Mhz to 2 GHz will be covered.’
Mamdouh Eldamaty, Egypt’s former antiquities minister, has said there is a ’90 per cent’ chance the tomb has hidden chambers.
He claimed that finding them would be the ‘discovery of the century’.
The search began in 2015 following a claim by Dr Nicholas Reeves, an Egyptologist at the University of Arizona.
Based on Dr Reeves’ works, Japanese radar expert Hirokatsu Watanabe said he had evidence of two hidden chambers in the King’s tomb.
‘There is, in fact, an empty space behind the wall based on radar, which is very accurate, there is no doubt,’ he said at the time.
This prompted Egyptian antiquities minister Mamdough al-Damaty to issue a statement claiming he was almost certain there was a chamber behind the walls.
‘We said earlier there was a 60 per cent chance there is something behind the walls,’ he said at the time.
‘But now after the initial reading of the scans, we are saying now its 90 per cent likely there is something behind the walls.’
However, experts raised doubts about the claim after radar images from Mr Watanabe’s scans were released.
The National Geographic Society conducted a second series of radar scans in the hope of finding clearer evidence of a tomb.
They scanned the walls in question at five different heights, switching between two radar antennae with frequencies of 400 and 900 megahertz, respectively.
‘One was for depth perception, and one was for feature perception,’ said Eric Berkenpas, an electrical engineer at National Geographic who was accompanied by Alan Turchik, a mechanical engineer.
But results came up up blank.
Egypt’s antiquities ministry refused to accept the new results.
At a conference discussing the claims in 2016, archaeologists sitting on each side of the fence clashed over the controversial theory and plans to drill a hole in the wall.
Experts even disagreed about how the search for the chambers was handled, with the former antiquities minister Zahi Hawᴀss claiming the project lacked any real science.
The researchers who conducted the radar survey were not allowed to present their research at the conference.
Speaking at the conference, the famed Egyptologist Hawᴀss rejected the theory undiscovered chambers lie behind the tomb.
