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Monday, 30 September, 2002, 20:30 GMT 21:30 UKTut's life and death unmasked British and NZ experts have reconstructed the faceThis is the face behind the famous golden death mask of King Tutankhamun. He lived in very turbulent times and it does seem likely from what the detectives have found out that he was assassinated Scientists and special effects artists in the UK and in New Zealand employed digital techniques normally reserved for crime investigations to reconstruct what the young pharaoh might have looked like. The fibreglass bust has gone on display at London's Science Museum. It was produced to illustrate...

The boy King died young and was buried in haste. Now a pair of U.S. gumshoes, armed with modern forensics, is trying to crack an ancient case The tomb of the boy King Tutankhamen created a sensation from the moment it was uncovered in 1922. One of the few royal burial chambers that survived the centuries relatively intact, it was by far the richest — filled with gold, ivory and carved wooden treasures, including what may be the world's most famous funerary mask. But there was also something troubling about the way King Tut was buried — hints and omissions...

In 1996 in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Italian mineralogist Vincenzo de Michele spotted an unusual yellow-green gem in the middle of one of Tutankhamun's necklaces. The jewel was tested and found to be glass, but intriguingly it is older than the earliest Egyptian civilisation. Working with Egyptian geologist Aly Barakat, they traced its origins to unexplained chunks of glass found scattered in the sand in a remote region of the Sahara Desert. But the glass is itself a scientific enigma. How did it get to be there and who or what made it? Thursday's BBC Horizon programme reports an...

Cray Supercomputer at Sandia Helps Researchers Discover Origin of Mysterious Glass Found in King Tut's Tomb Released : Tuesday, July 31, 2007 7:26 AM Global supercomputer leader Cray Inc. (NASDAQ: CRAY) today announced that researchers running simulations on the Cray supercomputer at Sandia National Laboratories have re-created what could have happened 29 million years ago when an asteroid explosion turned Saharan sand into glass. The greenish natural glass, which can still be found scattered across remote stretches of the desert, was used by an artisan in ancient Egypt to carve a scarab that decorates one of the bejeweled breastplates buried...

Mysterious Egyptian Glass Formed by Meteorite Strike, Study Says Stefan Lovgren for National Geographic News December 21, 2006 Strange specimens of natural glass found in the Egyptian desert are products of a meteorite slamming into Earth between 100,000 and 200,000 years ago, scientists have concluded. The glass—known locally as Dakhla glass—represents the first clear evidence of a meteorite striking an area populated by humans. At the time of the impact, the Dakhla Oasis, located in the western part of modern-day Egypt, resembled the African savanna and was inhabited by early humans, according to archaeological evidence (see Egypt map.) "This meteorite...

King Tut's necklace shaped by fireball June 26, 2006 LONDON: Scientists believe they have solved the mystery surrounding a piece of rare natural glass at the centre of an elaborate necklace found among the treasures of Tutankhamun, the boy pharaoh. They think a fragile meteorite broke up as it entered the atmosphere, producing a fireball with temperatures over 1800C that turned the desert sand and rock into molten lava that became glass when it cooled. Experts have puzzled over the origin of the yellow-green glass -- carved into the shape of a scarab beetle -- since it was excavated in...

There is a 90 percent chance the tomb of King Tutankhamun contains a hidden chamber, Egypt's antiquities minister said on Saturday at the end of a three-day probe in the boy king's burial. The investigation included for the first time the use of radar scans and focused mainly on the northern wall of the tomb.

SAQQARA, Egypt (AP) _ Archaeologists have unearthed six 3,500-year-old tombs they believe reveal important details about the structure of government in a period considered Egypt's golden age, the nation's top archaeologist said Thursday. Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt's Supreme Council of the Antiquities, also discussed an exhibit of Egyptian treasures to tour the United States beginning June 30 at Washington's National Gallery of Art. The exhibit is bigger than the blockbuster King Tut show of the 1970s. Earlier this week, archaeologists working on a dig supervised by Hawass just outside Cairo, found the six tombs at the foot of the...

Archaeologist Nicholas Reeves believes Tutankhamun's remains may have been rushed into an outer chamber of what was originally Queen Nefertiti's tomb. The remains of Tutankhamun, who may have been her son, were found in 1922. He died 3,000 years ago aged 19. ... Dr Reeves developed his theory after the Spanish artistic and preservation specialists, Factum Arte, were commissioned to produce detailed scans of Tutankhamun's tomb. The scans were then used to produce a facsimile of the 3,300-year-old tomb near the site of the original Valley of the Kings in Luxor. While assessing the scans last February, Dr Reeves spotted...

Two archaeological discoveries led to the identification of the creator of Nefertiti's bust. The first was uncovered at Tell el-Amarna near the artists' workshop where the bust was created. (The bust was unearthed in this workshop during excavations in December 1912.) Outside the workshop, the excavators discovered a horse's blinker -- used to prevent the horse from looking toward the rear and sometimes to the side -- inscribed with the name Thutmose, who was identified by the following titles: "favored by the King," "Chief of Works," and "seankh" (a designation that means "he who gives the final touch of life"2...

Swiss art historian Henri Stierlin, author of a dozen works on Egypt, the Middle East and ancient Islam, says in a just-released book that the bust currently in Berlin's Altes Museum was made on the orders of Germany archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt on site at the digs by an artist named Gerardt Marks... He said he believed it was made to test pigments used by the ancient Egyptians. The historian said the archaeologist had hoped to produce a new portrait of the queen wearing a necklace he knew she had owned and also carry out a colour test with ancient pigments...

"This time I mean it very seriously," is how Egypt's chief archaeologist, Zahi Hawass, characterized his fresh demand for the bust of Queen Nefertiti, which German archaeologists brought home in 1913... Hawass has long called on Berlin to return the bust of Nefertiti, which sits in the city's Egyptian Museum, but SPIEGEL revealed in this week's edition of the magazine that an obscure document from 1924 charged the German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt with "cheating" to secure the bust for Germany... The secretary of the German Oriental Institute reported in 1924 on a 1913 meeting between Borchardt and a senior...

Queen Nefertiti: More than a pretty face German scientists have discovered that the world's most beautiful woman allowed herself to be sculpted with wrinkles to appear more beautiful. Maybe wrinkles are not so bad, after all, some German scientists have discovered. In ancient times, such laugh lines and wrinkles around the mouth improved the face of Nefertiti, the Egyptian queen acclaimed as the world's most beautiful woman. X-ray pictures of the bust by a computer tomography machine at the nearby Charite Hospital in Berlin revealed that the sculpture is a piece of limestone with details added using four outer layers...

The Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities has just announced that a scientific team has found initial evidence of what might be a hidden chamber in the tomb of King Tutankhamun. [Update: See video below.] A survey of the tomb was conducted using infrared thermography, which measures temperature distributions on a surface. According to Mamdouh el-Damaty, the Minister of Antiquities, “the preliminary analysis indicates the presence of an area different in its temperature than the other parts of the northern wall.” One possible explanation is that the variation in temperature is, in effect, an infrared shadow of an open area behind the...

Restorers have put their work on the famed golden burial mask of King Tutankhamun on display in Cairo, over a year after the beard was accidentally knocked off and hastily glued back on with epoxy. A German-Egyptian team of experts showed off the mask in a laboratory in the Egyptian Museum, detailing plans for how the epoxy will be scraped off and the beard carefully removed before being reattached by a method to be determined by a joint scientific committee. Christian Eckmann, the lead restoration specialist, said the work should take a month or two, depending on how long it...

Although monotheism is usually associated with Judaism, Christianity, and Islam, there have, in fact, been a number of other monotheistic religions in world history. Iran, in particular, was a center for monotheistic thought, being home to both Zoroastrianism and Manichaeism. At first glance, ancient Egypt, with its hundreds of exotic gods, would seem the last place for a monotheistic revelation. Yet one of the earliest monotheists known to history was Akhenaten, pharaoh of Egypt from 1352-1336 BC, who perhaps lived in the generation before Moses. Akhenaten was born of royal parents, raised and trained in the religious traditions of Egypt...

Any scholar who knows archaeology should discuss his theory in the presence of scholars who know the Valley of the Kings and are working there now. Instead, this theory was analysed by Egyptologists who have never worked in the valley or written a single article on Tutankhamun or his tomb. Reeves has gained a lot of publicity for saying nothing.

Ahram Online spoke with Minister of Antiquities Mamdouh Eldamaty regarding an upcoming radar scan of Tutankhamun’s tomb to determine if Queen Nefertiti is buried in a hidden chamber. The theory that Nefertiti may be buried in Tutankhamun’s tomb was introduced by Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves. Ahram Online (AO): What is your opinion about Reeves' theory, and could it be true? Minister: It is a respectable scientific theory that could prove right or wrong, and when examining the west and north walls of Tutankhamun’s burial chamber, I realised that all the evidence that Reeves mentioned regarding the existence of hidden chambers is...

CAIRO (AP) — An Egyptian official says the Antiquities Ministry has given initial approval for the use of non-invasive radar to verify a theory that Queen Nefertiti's crypt may be hidden behind King Tutankhamun's 3,300-year-old tomb in the famous Valley of the Kings.

Queen Nefertari, whose name means “beautiful companion”, was one of Ramses II’s eight royal wives and his most beloved one. Although Nefertari’s family background is unknown, the discovery of an inscription of the cartouche of the pharaoh Ay inside her tomb has led archaeologists to speculate that she was related to him. If any relation exists, she could be his great-granddaughter because of the time between the reign of Ay and Ramses II in Ancient Egyptian history. Until now no decisive archaeological evidence has been found to link Nefertari to the royal family of the 18th Dynasty. Nefertari married Ramses...