A sculpture of Nefertiti at the Egyptian Museum in Berlin. Photograph by Markus Schreiber / AP

Update, November 10th: preliminary infrared scans have, indeed, found signs of a hidden chamber behind the painting on the north wall. More tests are planned.

On the north wall of the burial chamber of a tomb known as KV-62, in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, there is a mural in which a dead pharaoh is depicted with a living one, who is performing a ceremony known as the Opening of the Mouth, meant to revive the pharaoh in the afterlife. The pharaohs' names are painted in cartouches above the images—they are Tutankhamun, who reigned from about 1332 to 1323 B.C., and his successor, Ay. Tut was laid to rest in a sarcophagus placed in a gold-masked coffin next to the mural. (Ay, whose brief reign brought about the effective end of the eighteenth dynasty, is elsewhere.) But, last week, Nicholas Reeves, an Egyptologist at the University of Arizona, published a paper arguing that the north wall is, in more than one sense, false. Reeves believes that it is a blind, hiding a secret chamber, and that the painting on it was altered in ancient times to tell a lie about whose tomb this really is. There is, he writes, “powerful evidence that the original owner of Tutankhamun’s tomb had in fact been a royal woman.” He thinks that he knows which one: Nefertiti, and he suspects that her body is still lying behind the wall.

"The reason I come to Nefertiti is not by chance,” Reeves told me by phone from the United Kingdom. The tomb of Nefertiti, who is known throughout the world on account of the transfixingly beautiful sculpture of her head in the Egyptian Museum in Berlin, has never been found, despite some embarrassingly hyped claims. Reeves says that he discovered its location on a computer screen. A few years ago, Factum Arte, a Spanish architectural design firm, took ultra-high-resolution scans of its every surface of Tutankhamun’s tomb, as part of a project to build a facsimile of the space for tourists, and put them online. You can see each flake of paint—more clearly, really, than if you stood inches away. You can also view it in pure black and white, without distracting colors. Reeves stared at the scans for months. He became convinced that he saw the outlines of two doors—“ghosts” emerging from the plaster, which had previously been believed to hide only bare stone. One outline, in the west wall—“very neat and tidy, a nice little doorway"—was the same size as and located symmetrically in relation to a known door in the tomb, which seemed too much to ascribe to coincidence. The other was in the painted north wall. (If you look hard, you can see them, which may be a testament to suggestibility, or to our capacity to miss the obvious.)

The door in the north wall, Reeves believes, leads to Nefertiti’s burial chamber, and the other to a storeroom, possibly holding treasures. He offers, in support of this theory, evidence drawn from what is known about tomb architecture, iconography, stratigraphy, and contemporary records. But he also relies—and this is the most intriguing, and most problematic, part of Reeves’s theory—on ideas about dynastic politics, gender confusion, power, and what it would have meant for a woman, in Egypt, to be not just a queen but a pharaoh.

There are oddities about Tutankhamun’s tomb that Reeves's new theory would explain. In 1922, when Howard Carter first descended the stairway to the tomb, the set-up did not, to him, seem very kingly. The first room, though crowded with fine things, was small, and the tomb’s orientation was odd—to the right of the stairs, not to the left, as was more often the case with pharaohs of that time. Some side rooms, normally placed in a symmetrical array, seemed to be missing. “The unfamiliar plan of [the] tomb repeatedly caused us to ask ourselves in our perplexity whether it was really a tomb or a Royal Cache?” Carter wrote in his journal. But the goods in the room were excellent, and many of them were marked with the name Tutankhamun. “The mystery gradually dawned upon us,” Carter wrote. “We had found that monarch's burial place.” Carter was convinced, even before he opened the sealed door leading to what his team registered as the “final” chamber, housing the sarcophagus. The tomb belonged to Tutankhamun, “in all his magnificent panoply of death.”

And yet even as various lords, Egyptian officials, and the Princess of Abyssinia rushed to the valley to witness the discovery, Carter couldn’t shake the sense that something was off. He and his colleagues noted insets of vultures put in backward ("the tails w[h]ere the heads should be”) and shrines oriented the wrong way. The whole thing still struck him as “semi-royal … In fact in plan & size what might be termed demi-royal.” Or, perhaps, co-royal. Carter and others since have offered an explanation that does not involve secret rooms: Tutankhamun died young, and unexpectedly, at a time of political chaos. There wasn’t time for something better. Still, the revised floor plan Reeves proposes would have made more sense to Carter. Whether there are rooms behind the walls is one question, and should be fairly easy to resolve, with ground-penetrating radar equipment. Indeed, given the evidence that Reeves has assembled, it would be madness for the Egyptian antiquities authorities not to at least check. (On Friday, the Luxor_ Times_ reported, the minister of antiquities said that the ministry would conduct studies to examine the theory.) What or who might be in those rooms is another question, and involves, as Reeves is the first to concede, more degrees of speculation. "There's a lot of ‘I think’ in this article, I'm afraid," he said.

Why would Nefertiti, of all people, be in King Tut's tomb? Or, to state Reeves’s thesis more correctly, why would he be in hers? They were part of the same family, and also part of an extraordinary attempt on the part of Pharaoh Akhenaten—Nefertiti’s husband and almost certainly Tutankhamun's father—to turn Egypt into a monotheocracy, built around the worship of a single God, Aten, the sun. Akhenaten and Nefertiti moved their court from Thebes to Amarna; the period of religious upheaval he instigated is known as the Amarna interlude, or the Amarna heresy. Depictions of the family in the art of this time look like something from a nineteen-sixties commune, with Akhenaten, with his distinctive elongated features, Nefertiti, and their daughters (there were likely six, though counts vary) turned toward the divine sun, which is represented as a disc with rays that end in hands holding ankhs, like some Egyptological octopus; a boy, then called Tutankhaten, younger than most of the girls, eventually joins them.

Completing the vibe, no one is quite sure who Tut's mother was. Recent DNA tests suggest she was a full sister of his father, Akhenaten, but there are disputes about that, because of the age of the mummies, the possibility of cross-contamination, and the way that royal incest blurs genetic profiles. One counter-theory is that Nefertiti was his mother, and that she and Akhenaten, though not siblings, appeared to be so in the DNA tests because they were the product of generations of cousin-marriage. (Reeves is agnostic on this point; he was frustrated, though, with the headlines referring to Nefertiti as “Tut’s Mom.”) Other theories hold that the mother was a woman named Kiya, or even Meketaten, one of the six princesses—that is, that Akhenaten had a child with his daughter. His father, Amenhotep III, had married one and perhaps two of his daughters; this family pushed borders, even by pharaonic standards.