In a development that has revived one of Egyptology’s most intriguing debates, the theory that Tutankhamun and his stepmother Nefertiti, the celebrated chief queen of Akhenaten whose bust is one of the most iconic images of Ancient Egypt, may share the same eternal resting place has returned to the spotlight.

New research has once again revived the remarkable and tantalising hypothesis put forward in 2015 by the prominent British Egyptologist Nicholas Reeves, which sent shockwaves through the field of Egyptology. According to the theory, Tutankhamun’s small tomb in the Valley of the Kings (KV62) contains additional unexplored chambers and is in fact only part of a substantially larger burial complex, hidden behind what appear to be the solid walls of the known tomb.

Reeves has stuck to that view ever since, against all odds. Drawing on a meticulous iconographic analysis of the paintings in the burial chamber and on high-resolution photographs taken by the Spanish company Factum Art while scanning the tomb to produce a replica — photographs that appear to suggest the presence of sealed doorways — he argues that the tomb was originally designed for Nefertiti, with Tutankhamun effectively an interloper, and that the queen’s mummy may still lie within undiscovered chambers.

Eleven years ago, we seemed to stand on the very threshold of a potentially historic discovery. The tests carried out at the time proved inconclusive. We were told that further investigations would be needed. Eyebrows were raised across the Egyptological community. Zahi Hawass, in his characteristically categorical fashion, dismissed the whole idea as nonsense. And there matters were left, mercilessly so, as we continued to wonder, with a mixture of anticipation and scepticism, what secrets and marvels might lie, if any did, beyond Tutankhamun’s burial chamber.

Visiting Tutankhamun’s tomb has never been the same since. A new mystery gnaws at you. Are you standing only in the outer portion of a tomb that extends much farther beyond? With Nicholas Reeves’s theory in mind, you find yourself in the antechamber, looking to the right, unable to shake the thought that something — a passageway, perhaps, or undiscovered rooms — may lie hidden behind the northern wall of the burial chamber, beyond the sarcophagus, where the famous scenes of the young king’s funeral are depicted.

Yet no matter how intently you stare, however hard you try to pierce the wall with your gaze, you see nothing. Nothing except your quickened pulse and a marked tendency to sigh. Nor does Tutankhamun himself offer any clues. Behind you, his mummy seems almost to mock your curiosity with its faint, rabbit-like grin.

Is Tutankhamun merely an intruder, a cuckoo chick in Nefertiti’s nest, as Reeves so poetically suggests? Stranger discoveries have been made in Egypt. One need look no further than neighboring KV5, the tomb of the sons of Ramses II. Excavated in 1825 and long thought to be relatively modest, it was revealed in its full extent by Kent Weeks in 1995: a vast funerary complex comprising 130 chambers linked by a network of corridors.

The obvious question is why no holes are drilled to find out whether anything lies beyond the walls of KV62. So far, the Egyptian authorities, along with most Egyptologists, have not considered the evidence strong enough to justify such invasive tests on one of the most famous monuments in Egypt, and indeed the world. As a result, researchers have had to rely on non-invasive methods, which are rarely capable of providing conclusive answers.

And now Reeves and his supporters are back on the offensive. On September 17, they published a lengthy, detailed and scholarly study, A Review and Archaeo-Geophysical Assessment of the Structure and Morphology of the Tomb of Tutankhamun (KV62), the fourth paper in a series collectively titled The Burial of Nefertiti?, a veritable soap opera by now, some might say.

The 57-page paper, published in the Occasional Papers of the Amarna Royal Tomb Project, directed by Reeves himself, and once again highlighted by Nature, is co-authored by Reeves, former antiquities minister and archaeologist Mamdouh Eldamaty, a firm believer in the extended-tomb theory; geophysicist Abbas Mohamed Abbas; and George Ballard, a specialist in the investigation of historic structures.

The article details two new research campaigns carried out inside and around the tomb under the auspices of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA). In their search for evidence of unknown spaces, the researchers deployed an array of technology worthy of the Death Star, including microgravimetry, a non-destructive geophysical technique that measures minute local variations in the Earth’s gravitational field to detect differences in subsurface density.

The authors of the study argue that it can now be said that “the structure of KV62 predates the interment of Tutankhamun and is likely to be more extensive than traditionally understood.” That alone, the possibility that Tutankhamun’s tomb is larger than previously thought, would be a bombshell.

I read the paper with all the excitement you might imagine, an excitement that gradually waned as the text ventured ever deeper into dense scientific terminology that lies well beyond my modest understanding (“this simple program used the Talwani algorithm to calculate the Bouguer anomaly over a polygon”; and they say hieroglyphs are difficult). Still, taken as a whole, it is highly stimulating.

The researchers place themselves under the patronage of Howard Carter, who, they argue, had already suspected that the tomb continued beyond its known limits, although the exploratory trenches he allegedly dug in secret to test the idea were, according to the authors, in the wrong place. He failed to take into account that queens’ tombs turn to the right.

The authors begin by revisiting earlier work and Reeves’s original hypothesis that the layout of KV62 extends beyond what is visible today. They acknowledge that the results of the initial tests carried out between 2015 and 2018 were insufficient to prove anything, but argue that the new approach, combining multiple disciplines in a “holistic” methodology and making use of new technologies such as ground-penetrating radar, electrical resistivity tomography and microgravimetry, places us in a very different position.

In the first part of the paper, Reeves, who has incorporated the theory into the new edition of his reference work The Complete Tutankhamun, revisits the argument that Tutankhamun’s tomb is highly unusual for a royal burial of the 18th Dynasty and that there are two possible explanations.

The first is that it was originally a private tomb that was hastily adapted to house Tutankhamun and his funerary equipment following the young pharaoh’s unexpected death. The second is that KV62 was in fact a queen’s tomb, whose outer sections were repurposed for Tutankhamun’s burial, while the original owner’s interment was left undisturbed in deeper, inaccessible chambers.

According to Reeves, and it is all tremendously exciting, when Tutankhamun died, alterations were made to the front part of that queen’s tomb, namely Nefertiti’s, to accommodate the dead king and his possessions, while the remainder of the funerary complex was sealed off.

The Egyptologist points to modifications in the tomb’s decoration that, he argues, reveal this repurposing. In an initial phase, the central figure in the painted scenes would have been Nefertiti herself, acting as pharaoh after the death of her husband Akhenaten and ruling under the throne name of the enigmatic Smenkhkare, while Tutankhamun was depicted officiating at her funeral rites. In a second phase, the deceased became Tutankhamun and the officiant his successor, Ay.

What is now the burial chamber, the “House of Gold” in Ancient Egyptian terms, would originally have been little more than a passageway leading to the deeper reaches of a much larger tomb where the queen rested, or perhaps still rests. Reeves also identifies a number of apparent anomalies in the walls that, he contends, may indicate the presence of blocked entrances leading to the supposed corridor and to additional storage chambers for funerary goods.

To be precise, and to complicate matters still further, Reeves identifies four phases in the tomb’s development: an initial construction phase for a queen consort; a second modification following Nefertiti’s supposed elevation to co-regent; a third when she assumed the full rank of pharaoh after Akhenaten’s death; and a final phase, a decade later, when Tutankhamun died and the golden boy was put in there.

The second, highly technical section of the paper is authored by George Ballard and focuses on the tomb’s geophysical investigation. He reviews earlier studies, including those by Watanabe and Porcelli, as well as some findings that have not previously been published. None of these, he notes, proved conclusive in determining whether the cavities and voids detected beyond the tomb’s walls were anthropogenic in origin, that is, created by human activity.

Ballard nevertheless concludes that Reeves’s hypothesis has not been definitively disproved. “Geophysical investigation of the area surrounding KV62 has led to the identification of a number of intriguing features that could be passages or chambers,” he writes.

Ballard himself, together with Abbas, authors the paper’s third section, the heart of the matter. They describe the new tests carried out both inside and outside the tomb and emphasize that echoes consistent with rubble have been detected in two areas beyond the northern wall of the burial chamber. These could correspond to the fill customarily used to seal passageways in tombs.

These and other findings, they argue, are consistent with the proposition that chambers and passageways exist beyond the northern and western walls at the far end of Tutankhamun’s tomb. Particularly intriguing are a series of rectangular features on the other side of the northern wall. Equally compelling is the suggestion that readings indicating high-density material in the center of one of these spaces are exactly what one might expect to find “in a well-stocked, undisturbed funerary chamber.”

In their summary, the researchers state that they have identified, “with a high probability,” a funerary complex extending some 20 to 30 meters north of KV62. They add: “Five or six chambers are likely to exist in this space, and there is a clear expectation that the voids detected connect to themselves and to KV62 by passageways deliberately filled with rubble in antiquity.” Access to the complex, they suggest, appears to be “via a corridor whose access is concealed behind a mortared stone wall at the eastern end of the current burial chamber.”

In his conclusion, Mamdouh Eldamaty argues that the evidence strongly suggests ”the existence of at least one further storage chamber” in Tutankhamun’s tomb (which would be located behind the west wall of his burial chamber), as well as a continuation beyond the northern wall in keeping with the layout of royal burials.

“Even if this latter hidden complex does not ultimately prove to be the burial place of Nefertiti herself, the evidence increasingly points towards a connection with the Amarna royal family and the immediate circle of Akhenaten’s court,” he writes.

If the extension of the tomb were to be confirmed, he concludes, “it could potentially rank among the most transformative archaeological discoveries of the modern era, fundamentally reshaping our understanding of the political, religious, and dynastic history of the Amarna Period itself.”

The obvious next step, the researchers stress, now that non-invasive methods have been exhausted, is “direct investigation by finding a means to access directly one of the proposed new chambers and achieve a photographic inspection of its nature.”

For now, all we can do is keep wondering.

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It is as though the walls of his office were almost covered by the dead branches of a tree. Floor-to-ceiling shelves are packed with folders, their once-red and green covers faded by time. Inside are dozens of tropical dried plant specimens, tied with string alongside pages of notes. To most people, the mass of documentation would look like a pile of leaves fallen from the sky, but José Luis Fernández-Alonso knows exactly where everything is in his small jungle.

“It is not much,” says the botanist and taxonomist. He keeps far more downstairs, in the herbarium in the basement of Madrid’s Royal Botanic Garden, part of Spain’s National Research Council (CSIC). From there, Fernández-Alonso has just published three studies describing 18 new tree species from Colombia, Ecuador and Peru, the result of 30 years of work.

It has taken him so long because botanists can no longer devote their lives solely to naming plant species, he explains. He has pursued his own lines of research little by little, always taking advantage of expeditions funded for other purposes that carried “greater economic interest,” such as studying the essential oils of plants or the proteins in seeds. He did not mind moving slowly, nor was he worried that another scientist might beat him to naming those species, since, he says, no one else has worked in those areas along the Pacific coast of northern South America. But now he is in a hurry.

Although he hopes to continue working independently, the researcher is 66 and will retire at 70. And he is likely the only person in the world capable of making sense of the papers stored in his office. “I still have several things in progress,” he says. He then sets about looking for them, these large leaves from the South American rainforests, with an energy that belies his loafers and thick moustache. Stretching up to grab one folder after another as if reaching into a tropical tree, he adds: “I do not know how much I will manage to do, but what I publish will be easy for others to consult. What I leave in my memory and in my folders nobody will understand, because they are very complex things,” he laments.

His most recent publication, in the Journal of the Colombian Academy of Exact, Physical and Natural Sciences, is only “a part” of his life’s work, he explains. The 18 newly described species belong to the neotropical genera Matisia and Quararibea of the Malvaceae family, each of which already comprises around a hundred described species, according to the International Plant Names Index.

Fernández-Alonso had already named several of them in earlier studies. They come from the “rainy, humid and lush” Pacific forests, which the botanist first set foot in in 1989 as a fellow on an expedition organized by the National University of Colombia. “When I went into the field I began to see that there was a lot of variety of malvaceous trees in these forests,” he recounts. “My supervising professor, the American Alwyn Gentry, was setting up plots of 1,000 square meters [the size of four tennis courts] in different forests around the world to record species diversity per area. They looked at every trunk in the grid, and it was in those places that the greatest variety of trees was seen.”

He remembers it as if it were yesterday — and fortunately so. Over the following three decades, Fernández-Alonso returned to his notes from that first journey to the Colombian jungles to publish several studies. His office is a little warm. He keeps the window closed in case an insect gets in and contaminates the loose specimens, though it is nowhere near as hot as the forests where he collected them. Suddenly, he clears everything from his desk and, out of nowhere, produces the very notebooks he took to South America in the 1990s, filled from cover to cover with handwritten notes and sketches. His entire life is there. Written by hand.

“For a botanist, field notebooks are essential,” he says. “The idea is that each expedition you undertake translates into samples that are cataloged in a notebook associated with a date, a location and the collectors.”

He is describing taxonomy, the scientific discipline devoted to classifying all living things. It is a hidden, centuries-old profession that Fernández-Alonso calls “vital.” “The more information you have about species and their distribution, which are rare or threatened, the more arguments you will have to conserve them,” he says. “It is urgent because there are species that are endemic to a territory.”

Taxonomy also has practical applications, he points out, and that is often what secures funding for expeditions. He warns: “If taxonomy falls apart, no one will be able to identify pests or organisms for applied sciences, chemists, doctors or foresters.”

Fernández-Alonso believes that “a lot of people have grown comfortable” with researching plant DNA. “Sometimes it has created many conflicts and low-quality data,” he says. “You have to go and understand them in the field, how species are distributed and why they interact. You must combine modern DNA methods with fieldwork that gathers habitat data and information on pollinators.”

He is a hands-on scientist, one who admits he is not very good with computer software and yet estimates he has discovered around 150 new plant species over the course of his career. Obtaining some tree specimens required repeated visits to the forest before he could collect a leaf, sometimes from the ground when the fertile parts of the plant were out of reach.

“The conditions are tough,” he says. “Sometimes it is complicated, or you run out of water, which has happened to me. You risk drinking from any source and then have digestive problems, but that is part of it.”

The methods used by taxonomists have changed little over the years. Fernández-Alonso has made many discoveries by following the footsteps and clues found in the journals of José Celestino Mutis, who led the Royal Botanical Expedition to the New Kingdom of Granada, encompassing present-day Colombia, Panama, Ecuador and Venezuela, between 1783 and 1808.

He pulls out a folder and shows a plant that had never been described before. “I dedicated it to Mutis,” he explains proudly. Its name is Stemodia mutisii.

Fernández-Alonso has traveled to areas that few botanists have visited in modern times. He recalls “a very interesting route, in a region that had little data because it was traditionally a red zone controlled by the guerrilla.” He recounts: “There were roads where there was conflict that became less dangerous and we went on an expedition.” It was in those places that he found “marvels,” he says.

Like Mutis, he hopes those marvels will remain for “someone who comes 100 years from now and finds your plants there, in the herbarium.” Different studies estimate the number of flora still unknown between 10,000 and 100,000, but Fernández-Alonso dismisses such figures as “speculation.”

The truth is that he’s working around the clock to identify more new species out of his folders. It’s a long process, he explains. But he no longer plans to return to the forests. His felt hat — which could easily be Indiana Jones’s — hangs on a hook in his office. “It is time to write,” he says.

He’s not even thinking about returning to his hometown in Valladolid, where, as a child, he competed with his brother to compile data on all the insects in Encinas de Esgueva. He also did that with a notebook — the first step into the world of taxonomy — which he still keeps in his office.

“It is a race against myself,” he concludes. “I will sacrifice visits to my hometown so I can produce these pending publications.”

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He had a solution for everything. There was no problem he couldn’t tackle. Whether it was forcing open a lock by melting ice, building a defibrillator out of two candlesticks and a microphone cable, making a bomb with a stick of chewing gum or defusing one with a paper clip. He could even stop a sulfuric acid leak with milk chocolate bars. As a popular Spanish saying inspired by the character goes: “You’re more dangerous than MacGyver in a hardware store.”

“I had no idea people said that in Spain. That’s fantastic,” says Richard Dean Anderson, the actor who brought the resourceful hero to life, bursting into laughter. Warm and engaging, the 76-year-old was one of the biggest nostalgia draws at last weekend’s San Diego Comic-Con Málaga. At the event in the Spanish city, he signed autographs, posed for photographs with fans and took part in an entertaining panel discussion. He also spoke with EL PAÍS.

“Meeting fans is wonderful. It’s the best part of all this,” says the U.S. actor, who appreciates the warmth of the public, if not the warmth of the weather. “I’m from Minnesota. I have thick blood. Yesterday [Friday] was really hot. It was terrible,” he says while figuring out how to use a handheld fan.

He adds: “We ran into a bit of chaos that didn’t seem to keep the fans in mind. I don’t know if they are getting what they came for. I suppose I could adjust and accept that’s the way it is here, but I think about the fans, the people who pay the money to come and meet me and get an autograph or whatever… It all feels a little casual.”

“Still, I don’t really have a social life where I live and it’s always nice to meet people,” says Anderson, who lives north of Malibu, California, and leads a lifestyle far removed from that of a typical superstar.

Anderson spends most of his time with his dogs and walking by the sea, away from television and the media. It’s a personal choice. After appearing in more than 600 episodes of the daytime drama General Hospital and becoming MacGyver, he later took on the role of Lt. O’Neill in Stargate, a character that further cemented his popularity in the United States. It also proved to be one of the last major chapters of his acting career.

The turning point came with the birth of his daughter, Wylie Anderson, 28 years ago. He says he quickly realized that nothing was worth spending time away from her as a newborn. “Now she writes, directs and produces. I try to help her however I can, even if that means getting out of the way,” he says.

His face may have disappeared from television screens, but at last weekend’s event in Spain, four decades later, it was one of the most recognizable thanks to the enormous success of MacGyver. Created by Lee David Zlotoff for ABC, the series aired on Spanish public broadcaster TVE between 1985 and 1992. Over the course of its seven seasons, it became a global phenomenon, drawing huge audiences and turning Anderson into an international star. He says he landed the role after asking to keep his glasses on during the audition so he could read his lines.

“The people in charge looked at each other and said: if he doesn’t mind being seen with glasses in a role like this, we’ve found our MacGyver,” he recalls.

The character also closely resembled the real-life Richard Dean Anderson. “The writers put in things that I was interested in, which included the environment, animal rights, anti-gun [measures]. And then there’s a certain part of living as a human being, like I ski, played hockey, and did all those jocular things,” he says.

“MacGyver was different: a TV hero who didn’t use guns. He would think, look and solve the problems without killing somebody, without shooting them,” he explains. “That allowed parents and children to watch the show together. And that’s what I feel most proud of and happy about: those relationships, especially between daughters and dads. I think that combination made the series memorable to a broader audience than normal.”

His role was that of a superhero who, instead of a cape and powers, always had pliers within reach. He was an ordinary person who saved lives, rescued people, and solved conflicts using science, never guns. “I don’t think there are enough people in the world who are intrigued or humbled by science on television today. Because you really have to watch, listen and observe. Whereas a sitcom or a regular drama, you can just hear,” says Anderson.

The actor says he helped devise many of the ingenious fixes his character used to get out of trouble. “We had collaborators — advisers from technical schools and universities near Los Angeles. They told us how something could be solved with what was in the room, and others contributed too. It was a collective effort,” he remembers before pausing to consider whether MacGyver would have used artificial intelligence if it had been available to him.

“He’s more of a practical solver of problems, more physical,“ he says. ”He uses his science mind to see angles or possibilities of what is real, what is right here and now. I don’t know enough about AI, but it’s a little frightening because it appears to me that it takes away the human element. It becomes automatic; it solves. I like the human mind and the way it works now. I understand that AI is not going to let us decide. It’s going to dictate. That scares me. But MacGyver and AI? Maybe he’d just be intrigued, like: how could I use this?”

MacGyver and the Basques

With Anderson visiting Spain, it was impossible not to bring up something rather more peculiar: a first-season episode in which Angus MacGyver travels to the Pyrenees to go undercover, disguising himself with little more than a towel, among a group of “Basque mountain fighters who have been at war with France and Spain since time immemorial,” as the show’s narrator puts it.

The group — whose members wear txapelas and use pelota baskets to hurl grenades — look less like Basque separatists than an unlikely cross between highwaymen and Sicilian gangsters. In the episode, which later went viral on YouTube in Spain, the hero must rescue a geologist whom her captors mistakenly believe to be a physicist and whom, MacGyver suspects, they intend to use to help build an atomic bomb.

“It was so long ago that I don’t remember it,” says Anderson. He has much clearer memories, however, of past holidays in Barcelona and Ibiza, and admits he arrived in Málaga a couple of days early in order to explore the city. “The beach, its castle, it’s incredible,” he says.

During a panel on Saturday afternoon at the San Diego Comic-Con Málaga, Anderson took it upon himself, without being prompted, to describe U.S. President Donald Trump as “a piece of shit.” “Yes, he’s a piece of shit,” he said.

In his later conversation with EL PAÍS, he reiterated the point. “I dislike very much what he is. I don’t like his behavior, his policies, his ego. He’s a negative man. I just don’t respect him, which is the worst thing I can say about a human being. I don’t respect him at all. But it’s one man’s opinion,” he said.

Strong words from the man who played MacGyver, and they came just days after he found himself in a scene few would ever have imagined: posing for a photograph with the cast of Los Serrano, one of Spain’s most beloved television series. What a crossover that would have been.

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