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CAIRO — Radar scans of King Tut's tomb have revealed two spaces on the north and east chambers of the pharaonic mausoleum that could contain the "discovery of the century," Egypt's antiquities ministry said Thursday. Antiquities Minister Mamdouh al-Damaty told a press conference that metal and organic masses were revealed by the scans, signaling that the rooms could possibly contain funerary objects. "It could be the discovery of the century. It's very important for Egyptian history and the history of the world," he said, adding that the chambers may well have belonged to a king or queen. Further tests will...

On April 2, a new series of radar scans will be performed on King Tutankhamun's tomb to search for hidden chambers that may contain an undiscovered royal burial, Egypt's antiquities ministry has announced. The announcement comes after stories were published in numerous media outlets last week claiming that Egypt's tourism minister, Hisham Zazou, had told the Spanish news outlet ABC that the chambers had been proven to exist and contain numerous treasures. "The Ministry of Antiquities has not issued any statement concerning the results that have been reached so far," the ministry said in a statement released to Live Science....

Eight Egyptians involved in a botched repair of the famed burial mask of King Tut, which was corrected late last year, were referred to a disciplinary court on Sunday for "gross negligence" after prosecutors said that the golden treasure was scratched. The 3,300-year old mask, whose beard was accidentally knocked off and hastily glued on with epoxy in 2014, was scratched and damaged as a result of the amateur repair job, prosecutors said in a Sunday statement, which implicated the then-head of the Egyptian Museum and the chief of the restoration department. "In an attempt to cover up the damage...

According to a group of geneticists in Switzerland from iGENEA, the DNA genealogy center, as many as half of all European men and 70 percent of British men share the same DNA as the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun, or King Tut. For a film created for the Discovery Channel, scientists worked to reconstruct the DNA of the young male King, his father Akhenaten and his grandfather Amenhotep III. They discovered that King Tut had a DNA profile that belongs to a group called haplogroup R1b1a2. This group can be found in over 50 percent of European men and shows the researchers...

CAIRO (Reuters) - Dutch archaeologists have discovered the tomb of the Pharaoh Akhenaten's seal bearer, decorated with paintings including scenes of monkeys picking and eating fruit, Egyptian antiquities officials said on Wednesday. The tomb belonged to the official named Ptahemwi and was discovered during a Dutch team's excavation in the Sakkara area, the burial ground for the city of Memphis, the state news agency MENA said, quoting chief antiquities official Zahi Hawass. Akhenaten, the 18th-dynasty pharaoh who ruled Egypt from 1379 to 1362 BC, abandoned most of the old gods and tried to imposed a monotheistic religion based on worship...

The identity of his mother has long been a mystery, although she is not believed to be Akhenaten's Queen Nefertiti. Some theories suggest the boy king's mother was one of his aunts. "Maia is none other than princess Meritaten, the sister or half-sister of Tutankhamun and the daughter of Akhenaten and Nefertiti," Zivie said. He said his conclusion was based on the carvings of Tutankhamun and Maia on the walls of Maia's tomb. "The extraordinary thing is that they are very similar. They have the same chin, the eyes, the family traits," he said. "The carvings show Maia sitting on...

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...

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...

...The analyses revealed that the glass originate from the same glass workshops in Egypt that supplied the glass that the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun took with him to his grave in 1323 BC... Globalisation in the Bronze Age Twenty-three glass beads from Denmark were analysed using plasma-spectrometry. Without destroying the fragile beads, this technique makes it possible to compare the chemical composition of trace elements in the beads with reference material from Amarna in Egypt and Nippur in Mesopotamia, about 50 km south east of Baghdad in Iraq. The comparison showed that the chemical composition of the two sets of trace...

Contact: Dr. Paul Nicholson NicholsonPT@cardiff.ac.co.uk 44-292-087-4582 Cardiff University Ancient Egyptian glassmaking recreated 3000-year-old furnace rebuilt by archaeologist The reconstructed kiln built by Dr. Paul Nicholson of Cardiff University and Dr. Caroline Jackson of Sheffield University. A team led by a Cardiff University archaeologist has reconstructed a 3,000-year-old glass furnace, showing that Ancient Egyptian glassmaking methods were much more advanced than previously thought. Dr Paul Nicholson, of the University’s School of History and Archaeology, is leader of an Egypt Exploration Society team working on the earliest fully excavated glassmaking site in the world. The site, at Amarna, on the banks of...

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.

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...

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...

After analysing high-resolution scans of the walls of Tutankhamun's grave complex in the Valley of the Kings, Dr Reeves spotted what appeared to be a secret entrance. He described how he uncovered the 'ghosts' of two portals that tomb builders blocked up, one of which is believed to be a storage room. The other, on the north side of Tutankhamun's tomb, contains 'the undisturbed burial of the tomb's original owner - Nefertiti', Dr Reeves argued. If Dr Reeves is correct, the hidden tomb could be far more magnificent than anything found in Tutankhamun's burial chamber. He believes it is her...

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.