She ruled as queen over the land of Egypt nearly 3500 years ago. Her tomb was found by Howard Carter (who later discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun) over a century ago -- as was her mummy, which he left sealed in anther tomb as unimportant due to the lack of any identifying inscriptions or items.

Now, though, this ignored mummy has been identified as Queen Hatshepsut -- whose successor tried to erase all trace of her 15 year reign over the Valley of the Nile.

The British archaeologist Howard Carter discovered Hatshepsut's tomb while excavating at the Valley of the Kings in 1902. When he properly explored the tomb in 1920, two years before his famous discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb, Mr Carter found two sarcophagi, one for Hatshepsut and the second for her father, but both were empty.

Speculation about the riddle has, for years, focused on a separate tomb now known as KV60, which Mr Carter found and opened in the spring of 1903.

Inside he found coffins of mummified geese, which he removed, and the partially disturbed and decaying coffins of two women lying side by side. One bore the inscription of Sitre-In, Hatshepsut's wet nurse, the other was anonymous.

As the tomb was not royal it received little attention until the Egyptologist Donald Ryan reopened it in 1989. The sarcophagus marked with the name of the wet nurse was taken to Cairo museum, and the second unnamed sarcophagus remained behind.

Mr Hawass decided to re-investigate the mystery surrounding Hatshepsut for a television special to be aired by the Discovery network and his team removed the second sarcophagus to Cairo for a CT scan.

"That is the only mummy I have removed from the Valley of the Kings," he said.

The scan revealed that this mummy was an obese woman between the ages of 45 and 60 who had bad teeth. She also suffered from cancer, evidence of which can be seen in the pelvic region and the spine.

In search of more clues, Mr Hawass suggested a CT scanner be used to examine artefacts associated with the queen. One of those was a small wooden box that bore the cartouche, or royal seal, of Hatshepsut and contained a liver.

Embalmers typically eviscerated the dead before embalming them but preserved the organs in jars and boxes.

The CT scan also revealed a tooth in the box. Mr Hawass called in a dentist, Galal El-Beheri from Cairo University, who studied the scans of the tooth and of several female mummies.

"Not only was the fat lady from KV-60 missing a tooth but the hole left behind and the type of tooth that was missing were an exact match for the loose one in the box," Mr Hawass said.

The exact dimensions of teeth are unique to each mouth. The molar tooth in the box fits within a fraction of a millimetre with the space of the missing molar in the mouth of the mummy. The minuscule difference could be due to erosion of the gums after the tooth was extracted.

This is utterly incredible -- and shows how there is still so much to be learned about ancient civilizations through the work of archaeologists. This will be one to share with my students this fall.

Posted by: Greg at 09:52 PM | Comments (9) | Add Comment
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