Explore PM8500See Concrete Portfolio
Explore Concrete Scanners
Were the remains of Queen Nefertiti hidden in the walls of King Tutankhamun's burial chambers? That is what National Geographic found out when they conducted an archaeological investigation using modern technologies to analyze what lies beyond the ancient walls.
Get the best NDT and InspectionTech content delivered straight to your inbox
The National Geographic Society is a global non-profit organization committed to exploring, illuminating and protecting the wonders of our world.
For many years, there were theories about other chambers hidden within the walls of King Tutankhamun's tomb that may have contained the tomb and remains of Queen Nefertiti.
The National Geographic Society set out to find out the facts by radar testing the North, West and South walls of KV62 - King Tutankhamun’s tomb - in search of corridors suspected of leading to Queen Nefertiti's tomb.
GPR SLICE software was used to post-process, analyze and visualize the data from the ground penetrating radar testing. This gave deeper and clearer insights into any voids or structures hidden behind the walls.
GPR Slice became a full commercial product in 1994. But its impact began years before when pioneer Dean Goodman was carrying out large archaeological GPR surveys over Kofun burial mounds in Japan. His novel way of processing and visualizing GPR data by introducing revolutionary techniques (like overlay analysis, depth-slice animations, isosurfaces and volumes) marked a milestone in GPR archaeological prospection.
The results, shown in vector space comparison with a calibration wall reflection from the Treasury Room indicates that no corridors are present behind the walls in King Tut's Tomb at least to 2 meters depth. This confirmed that the tomb of the famous Queen Nefertiti is not located within chambers near King Tutankhamun's final resting place.
A follow-up 2018 survey that probed to a deeper 4 meters behind the walls by the University of Turin in Italy also found no void spaces indicating no hidden room or corridors exist.
See more archaeological investigations with advanced data analysis on our Tech Hub.