Tomb Raiders

By MICHAEL D. LEMONICK

It was a good story while it lasted. In February archaeologists announced the discovery of a new tomb in Egypt's Valley of the Kings, the first since Howard Carter unearthed King Tut's final resting place in 1922. Inside the tomb were seven coffins, and on the basis of several clues--such as pottery with inscriptions identical to some found with Tut--Zahi Hawass, head of Egypt's antiquities council, speculated that Tut's mother Queen Kiya might be inside one.

But proving that tale true was always a long shot, say the scientists who excavated the tomb, which is near Tut's and is known as KV63. And as the last of the coffins was opened to great fanfare last week, the skeptics turned out to be right. There was no mummy--and no Mummy--inside. Still, that doesn't put KV63 in the same category as Al Capone's infamously empty vault. The coffin was filled with ancient embalming materials, strips of linen and funerary garlands and collars made of dried flowers. That, says lead excavator Otto Schaden of the University of Memphis, means KV63 may have been a storage cache, as another tomb proved to be. That's important for history--but it would have been a lot more fun to find a queen.

With reporting by Reported by Andrea Dorfman