THE HIDDEN ROOMS OF TUTANKHAMUN'S TOMB

A century ago, Tutankhamun's tomb was discovered. But even today, controversy still rages over whether it contains undiscovered chambers. Here, an Egyptologist puts the rumours to bed... or, rather, firmly into their sarcophagus

- DYLAN BICKERSTAFFE

On 26 November 2022, it was 100 years since Howard Carter peered through a hole in the O entrance to the chambers of Tutankhamun's tomb and saw "wonderful things". It was to be one of the greatest archaeological discoveries of all time.

Before Carter discovered the tomb in November 1922, Tutankhamun was an obscure pharaoh, but far from unknown. It was known that he had started life as Tutankhaten and had been married to Ankhesenpaaten, the third daughter of the 'heretic pharaoh' Akhenaten and the queen Nefertiti, and that he had ruled briefly under this name at the city of Akhet-Aten (modern Amarna, about halfway between Cairo and Luxor).

This city had been founded by Akhenaten in honour of a single deity, the Aten. This abandoned Egypt's traditional polytheism of many gods presided over by 'the king of the gods', Amun-Ra.

However, after a few years, Tutankhamun changed his name in respect of the god Amun and returned to the old religion (his queen becoming Ankhesenamun at the same time). He was known to have ruled for a total of about nine years. Despite this, his association with the heretic regime meant that later kings excluded his name from king lists and usurped his name on monuments.

Carter was confident that Tutankhamun's tomb lay in the Valley of the Kings (at Luxor, in Upper Egypt), because a cache of leftover materials from the king's funeral had been found there in 1907. He was right, of course - it had been preserved under a thick layer of concrete-hard flood deposits.