Burial chamber in the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun (KV62) in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor, Egypt. "We don't know if this is Nefertiti's burial chamber, but it's full of treasures" … These words - to say the least astounding - are said to have been recently uttered by Hisham Zaazou, the Egyptian Minister of Tourism. He was referring to the two unknown coins that may be in the tomb of Pharaoh Tutankhamun. According to British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves, two unsuspected cavities would indeed be hidden behind the walls of the famous burial chamber of the young pharaoh buried in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor. And one of them could house nothing less than the remains of the famous Nefertiti...or another great ruler of Egypt.
If we are to believe the words of the minister, relayed by the Spanish national daily ABC of February 22, Hisham Zaazou allegedly asserted - during a recent trip to the Iberian Peninsula - that an official announcement would be scheduled for the month of April and would constitute a real "Big Bang". The Minister of Tourism is said to have even said "the tomb is not empty. We don't know if it is that of Nefertiti or another woman, but it is full of treasures… We will know more in April and it will be announced to the whole world. It will be a historic moment" .
Astounding freedom of tone for declarations of an unprecedented scale by the head of Egyptian tourism
At the end of November 2015, after three days of radar explorations of the tomb of Tutankhamun, results had confirmed the first tests carried out by HIP and the teams of the Scan Pyramids project. , who had already detected certain anomalies along the north and west walls of the burial chamber. "We said earlier that there was a 60% chance there was something behind the walls. After these analyses, we say there is a 90%", then declared Mamdouh El Damaty, the Minister of Egyptian Antiquities. At the same time, the British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves, at the origin of the hypothesis, declared that this piece could only belong to Queen Nefertiti, the great royal wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten. Other hypotheses now suggest that it would rather be Kiya, one of the wives of Pharaoh Akhenaton, or even Merytaton, one of his daughters, who could rest in this cavity. But some Egyptologists consider these assumptions fragile, not excluding however that unknown rooms can be identified in the tomb.
In a country as straddling the protocol as Egypt, where any announcement related to archeology is only made through a press release from the office of the Egyptian Ministry of Antiquities, one can however be surprised the freedom of tone and the extent of the declarations made by the head of tourism outside the country. Do his statements only express his own desire to see tourists flooding into Egypt again? Are they really the prelude to an exceptional announcement? The doubt will be removed in the coming weeks.