Radio Cadena Agramonte emisiora de Camagüey
One of the world's most famous archaeologists and former Egyptian Minister of Tourism and Antiquities, Zahi Hawass, hopes to discover the tomb of the famous Queen Nefertiti before he retires and says he is close to achieving it.
"I would be happy to end my career with the discovery of Egypt's most important queen: Nefertiti," Hawass said in El Hombre del Sombrero, a new documentary about his life and career, cited by Live Science.
Hawass claims to have narrowed the search for Nefertiti's tomb to a small region east of the Valley of the Kings.
Widely considered one of the most powerful women of antiquity, Nefertiti was the first wife of Akhenaten, a famous reformist pharaoh who reigned from 1353 to 1336 BC, and the stepmother of Tutankhamun.
Queen Nefertiti was the chief consort of Pharaoh Akhenaten and, together with her husband, carried out radical religious reforms in Ancient Egypt, the most important being the establishment of monotheism and the worship of the god Aten, the solar disk.
Some Egyptologists, including Hawass, believe that after Akhenaten's death, Nefertiti is thought to have become co-regent of Tutankhamun (whose birth name was Tutankhaten in honor of Aten and whose legendary tomb was discovered in 1922) but died a few years later. The failure to find Nefertiti's mummy has made her tomb the subject of all kinds of speculation. The tomb of Akhenaten's family in Amarna is empty.
Previously, Hawass's team found two tombs in the Valley of the Kings, known as KV 65 (discovered in 2006) and KV 66, near the burial of Queen Hatshepsut, a powerful female pharaoh who ruled between 1479 and 1458 BC.
Although neither tomb sheds direct light on Nefertiti's tomb, they demonstrate that important discoveries still remain to be made. The team is currently excavating in the eastern area, near the tomb of Hatshepsut. (Text and photo: RT)
