Local

This 68-year-old retired teacher and journalist is talking about sports-fishing sonar of the kind normally found on New Brunswick lakes.

If he could just get his hands on two or three of these devices, he enthuses to you, he would rig them to a laptop computer. Then he would mount them in water bags on the parched soil of Luxor, and use them to hunt down one of ancient Egypt's most famous unsolved mysteries: the missing 14th century BC royal tombs of Pharaoh Akhenaten and Queen Nefertiti.

He is convinced that this combination of household technology could lead to the burial site that has intrigued scholars of Egyptian antiquity for centuries. And not only that.

Under the right geologic circumstances, he says, it might allow them to peek inside these tombs without the need to even lift a shovel.

If the pharaoh's grave turns out to be close enough to the surface, "I would expect that we would be able to almost see whether or not his toenails had been trimmed that morning," he says with a wheezy laugh and, possibly, exaggeration.

If that sounds fishy to you, you may have to think again. This self-taught New Brunswick Egyptologist is taken seriously by many of his readers on the Internet. They include some computer scientists who agree that the know-how and the equipment for what Mr. Simms wants to do are falling into place.

One of these, an Egyptian computer science student at University of Calgary, ran last year with Mr. Simms' idea of using sound waves for underground imaging. His work earned him an MSc. He has applied for a patent on the resulting software he produced, which can be put to use in Canada for down-to-earth tasks like exploring underground pipes and finding hidden conduits in bridge decks.

"I have to say that the project almost certainly wouldn't have gone that way if we hadn't heard from Simms," says Emad Attia's thesis supervisor, Prof. Jim Parker, Calgary University's chairman of computer science.

As for whether he would look closely at sending a student along if Mr. Simms got his project going, Prof. Parker says, "I absolutely would, absolutely would."

Another is Reda Fayek, a systems design engineer at Waterloo University, who says he was ready to drop his doctoral thesis in 3D modelling and return to his native Egypt with Mr. Simms when the New Brunswicker first proposed his Kings Valley expedition, in 1995, with a price tag of more than a $1-million Cdn. The only thing that was missing from the project was the million dollars, he says.

"As an Egyptian, it struck me that, 'Whoa! this guy knows a lot more about my country and our history than I do.' I feel like an ignorant compared to him."

Another of Mr. Simms' readers has been Amr Kamel, rare books librarian at the American University in Cairo, who invited Mr. Simms to lecture to a 1997 convention celebrating the 75th anniversary of the discovery of King Tutankhamen's tomb. It would have gathered the top Egyptologists from around the world, Mr. Kamel says. But a terrorist massacre of German tourists in Luxor late that year put a stop to the event.

A fascination with things royal, ancient and Egyptian, is not the only thing these Internet readers all have in common. The other is the fact that even though they've been exchanging letters with him for years, they've never met Tom Simms.

Mr. Simms, existing on his old age pension and guaranteed income supplement, lives in one of those remote apartment towers in wooded East Saint John, where he has been waiting for two years to enter Saint John Regional Hospital for joint replacement surgery on his arthritic right hand. His left is almost as twisted, "but it can still play a good, walking bass on the piano," he says. His arthritis has placed the nearest convenience store and bus stop just outside his walking range.

Except for the kitchen and part of his bedroom, the rooms of his fastidiously clean apartment are surrounded in stacks of books and crated journals and papers, punctuated with the occasional overfilled shelving unit, a dining table and some chairs.

One ancient computer stands silently on a bedroom desk, while another, on cartons, is still lit up with an Email he's been composing. He spends four hours a day on these machines, and has up to 60 return letters waiting for him every morning.

On his cardboard-and-tape parlour desk, Mr. Simms assembles several photocopies into a gray-and-white blow-up of discoverer Howard Carter's 1923 panorama of the entrance pit to King Tutankhamen's tomb.

"And this," he says, pointing along the slope to the left of the pit, "this is the famous X."

He is referring to a central illustration in the World Wide Web site he co-wrote with Tareq Albaho, an Egyptian doctoral student now studying particle physics at University College London. Dr. Fayek has published the work on the web server of Waterloo University's Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence Laboratory, at http://pami.uwaterloo.ca/~reda/kings/kings.html.

The "Kings Valley Hidden Secret" site, with screens and screens of drawings and maps, lays out a proposal worth $741,000 U.S. to build a 31-tonne paddlewheel boat and park it at the west bank of the Nile to serve as an air-conditioned data processing centre while a shore crew carries out its high-tech hunt for Akhenaten and Nefertiti.

Much of the cost would be recovered through world-wide, live television coverage likely provided by the British company Scully Fine Art Productions, with whom the group is already negotiating, says the web page, which Mr. Simms group posted in 1995.

In the five years since he did his research for the cyberdocument, in 1994, technology has progressed so quickly that Mr. Simms says all he needs now for the job is a couple of sonar fish finders, a laptop computer "and a golf cart" in place of the mother ship. Dr. Fayek agrees.

Their web publication shows the X which Mr. Simms drew on Howard Carter's panorama to mark the location where he believes his sonar hunt should start. This is where a comparatively crude acoustic survey done in the 1970s by a Stanford Research Institute crew detected echoes from something they couldn't identify.

"If we were to go in there and image, we would get quite a different picture."

Lambert Dolphin, the Stanford team leader, pussyfooted when Mr. Simms kept suggesting to him by Email that there was something there, Mr. Simms recalls The loci of these echoes intersect at points that could be walls of a subterranean room the size of Tutankhamen's antechamber, he argued to Prof. Dolphin. "He would never quite agree with me."

Pharaoh Akhenaten, whose remains Mr. Simms was hoping were waiting there, had established worship of the sun god Aten as the first documented monotheistic religion prior to Judaism. Nefertiti had been his principal queen. But despite the royal couple's known significance, archeologists have found no trace of their tombs at Akhuet Aten, the royal city which the pharaoh had built.

Mr. Simms' theory is that when Akhenaten's successor abandoned the city and returned to Thebes (now Luxor) he brought the burials with him, to the Valley of Kings. The New Brunswicker has made several applications to the Egyptian government for a permit to carry out his sonar study, figuring that once he had the permit, sponsorships and money would flow from corporations and foundations. But the government has ignored him.

Now he says a British archeology team has vindicated his interpretation of the echoes. And he's raging about it. Just a couple days before Christmas last year, somebody dug up his X.

The expedition led by Prof. Geoffrey Martin and Dr. Nicholas Reeves, of University College London, was the first dig to be authorized by the Egyptian government since Carter's clearance of the Tutankhamen tomb 76 years before.

BBC-TV's coverage of the dig, produced by Scully, wasn't carried in Canada. And Mr. Simms, whose elderly computers can't read the web, has never seen Martin and Reeves' home page, let alone his own. But a friend wired him the Reeves and Martin manuscript. It showed Simms everything he needed to know.

"I was actually just shocked. That's the only word I can use for it. I was walking around in circles."

The two British archeologists had to have seen the printed copies of the Kings Valley web page which he sent to University College London in 1995, and the copies he sent to the American University in Cairo, he argues.

"You can be sure that the whole crew had my things laid out in front of them," he says.

Dr. Reeves denies pirating Mr. Simms' X.

"I'm familiar with the web page, or at least I've seen it, and I have to say I first suggested in print my interest in this area in 1984. And I've been advocating this has been an area of interest since then." It is the area left unexplored by Carter's extensive excavations.

He says Mr. Simms and his followers are missing the point when they call for the use of sonar to target unseen tombs. This is archeology, not a treasure hunt.

"We're excavating the area to try to recover the history of that particular area." The group is working to establish the relationship between Tutankhamen's burial and one of the other tombs nearby, he said. And it's studying the original landscape of the valley as it stood before it was churned up by excavators over the last couple hundred years.

"This is very important, very relevant to the preservation of the Valley of the Kings in the future, because - as you perhaps know - there has been a lot of flood damage over recent years. And one of the reasons the damage has been caused by these floods is that the landscape of the valley has changed.

"If we find another tomb, that is wonderful. But that is not the aim of the work. The aim of the work is to document this area, thoroughly, archeologically and topographically."

Just before they abandoned the site for the season, Reeves and Martin made a discovery which Mr. Simms says has confirmed his echo theory. They found two hieratic labels carved in the bedrock.

These inscriptions, he says, were left around the area in the 12th century BC by Wen Nefer, the scribe of the mayor of Western Thebes. They were place markers for official government grave-robbers, brought in by the pharaoh of the day to help fund his war with Nubia. The entrance to Tut's tomb - the only known grave in the area that the robbers missed - didn't have this marker.

Mr. Simms says the two signatures have proven him right at least partly. They show that just below the level where Martin and Reeves stopped digging, there are passages leading to two tombs. He may have been mistaken about the presence of one big room instead of two side-by-side tunnels, but at least he was right about something being there.

Dr. Reeves isn't as quick to jump to this conclusion.

"We found two graffiti left by a scribe of around 1,000 BC, which consist of nothing more than the name and title of the scribe," he says.

"So whether that actually means anything more, nobody can say until our excavations in that area are completed."

So, if sonar underground imaging can be this good, why isn't everybody using it? Dr. Fayek - whose doctoral program included writing a computer program that does 3-D imaging - says the holdback has been the huge computational power that this technique requires. The people who might use seismic imaging don't realize yet that in 1999, this power can be purchased cheaply in a laptop computer.

And, instead of recording measurements all day or all week and then hand-feeding their values into a computer, a modern seismic crew would simply have to plug two or more sonar devices directly into the computer and start them up, he says.

The computer produces an instant image, albeit a scanty one. And with each scan that come as the operator works his or her away across the field, "the picture gets clearer and clearer and clearer, and you're seeing better all the time."

This is an important improvement over the equipment which the Stanford team was forced to use in the 1970s. Dr. Fayek says his software provides instant feedback that shows where to scan next.

"The other guys would scan the entire day, go back for, say, a week [to process their data], and then come back and say, 'Oh, that's where we're going to dig."

When the Canadian system finds an underground corridor, "you are going to keep following that corridor in the proper direction until you see the end of the corridor, and there you would dig."

Now that three years have passed since he wrote his own experimental imaging program, he believes that recent commercially-made software probably would "take the exact same type of data and do maybe even better with it."

Does this mean you really can find a mummy's tomb with a fish finder, a laptop and a golf cart?

"That's in his domain," Dr. Fayek replied, in reference to Mr. Simms. "I cannot really decide what's good and what's bad. I only provide the technical, as in computational and possibly interpretational, end of things. . . I believe his opinion is going to be a lot more accurate in these areas than mine."

Prof. Parker may not have as much faith in Mr. Simms as Dr. Fayek does. But just when he's ready to write the New Brunswicker off, "something happens," he tells you.

Among these are Simms' challenge to develop underground sonar, and the Martin and Reeves discovery under Tom Simms' X.

"Everything that I've actually checked on seemed to be right, as things developed. He was confident that we could do this underground imaging thing, and damned if Emad didn't do it. And he was confident that there was something at that one spot, and damned if somebody didn't' find something. . .

"I'm not so sure he couldn't be a kook. But he seems to be a successful one. He also could be just really good.

"I'm sure Emad will tell you the same thing. He's either a complete nut, he's the luckiest man on earth, or he's very bright - maybe a little of each."

The reason Mr. Simms has been ignored by the Egyptian Antiquities Council and the London archeologists isn't hard to figure out. In the eyes of scientists, someone who expounds a lot of theories but doesn't have the academic credentials is often viewed as a crank, Prof. Parker says.

An example of this attitude was shown last year by Mr. Albaho, the man who co-authored Mr. Simms' web page. He said in an Email to Prof. Parker, "You know, I've talked to an archeologist in Stanford, and he told me this guy [Mr. Simms] is not an archeologist, and may be a nut," Prof. Parker recalls.

But Prof. Parker thinks Mr. Simms should be given the benefit of a doubt.

"So he is a backwoods Egyptologist. I'm convinced he doesn't have formal credentials in the subject. That didn't stop lots of people from doing their work. If I ever get down to your area of the woods, I will certainly make an effort to stop by this place, because I would love to chat with him for three or four hours about what he knows."

Likewise, Mr. Kamel says he is still interested in bringing Mr. Simms to Cairo because of his "very good" proposal.

He's not giving up on Mr. Simms, even though the real Egyptologists think the Canadian doesn't know the way to Nefertiti's tomb. Neither do the Egyptologists, as Mr. Kamel points out.

"He has suggested a location for the tomb of Nefertiti. Everyone is interested to see if it is real that Nefertiti is buried there or not, because it is very important. Nefertiti's tomb is still a big problem. It's a mystery. No Egyptologist can say precisely where Nefertiti or her husband Akhenaten were exactly buried."

Mr. Simms blames his standstill on a lot of bad luck. In early 1996, he was to meet at an Egyptian archeological site with Dr. Fedri Hassan, a University College London professor of Egyptology, he says. But that was when he lost his family fortune to his dealings with lawyer Joe Drozdowski, now disbarred. He couldn't go. Next, Tut's anniversary celebrations were cancelled, along with Mr. Simm's Cairo lecture.

Last August, he faxed Dr. Gaballah Ali Gaballah, secretary general of the Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities, that he was sending him a copy of his Kings Valley proposal. The Egyptian post office unaccountably returned it to him by surface mail. It didn't get back here until February.

All of these no-shows have given him the reputation as "a paper tiger," he figures.

It's almost like Tom Simms has been gripped by the famous Curse of the Mummy's Tomb.

Not yet, says Dr. Fayek.

"According to the myth, you would only be plagued if you go and tamper with the tomb. If he goes and finds something and opens it, he may be at risk. But he's been safe until now."

[Tell us what you think - comments, suggestions and letters to the editor] [Saint John Times Globe Front Page]

Home page.

Go back to Reda's home page.

You are visitor number since May 5, 1999.