Hatshepsut: A Queen-Sized Mummy

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Don't know if you've all heard the news or not out of Egypt, but a mummy found back in 1903 has been confirmed (as much as such things can be) to be Queen Hatshepsut, the first independent female pharaoh, and a pretty great one at that.

Turns out she was Queen-sized in every way, so ladies, next time you're worried about your weight, keep Hatshepsut in mind. You don't have to be slim and pretty to run a kingdom.

Fat lady's tooth leads to Egypt's lost queen

Scientists in Egypt claimed today that they had identified the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut, ancient Egypt’s most powerful female pharaoh and one of its most mysterious rulers. The archaeologists who made the finding hailed it as a crucial breakthrough in the study of ancient Egypt. It has yet to be independently reviewed by other experts.

The 3,500-year-old mummy was found in a burial ground in the Valley of the Kings in 1903 but was left unidentified at the site for decades, until two months ago when it was brought to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo for testing. The key to unlocking its identity was a loose tooth found in a relic box believed to contain some of the queen’s embalmed organs, according to the researchers. The molar is said to have fitted a gap in the jaw of the mummy.

Zahi Hawass, Egypt’s antiquities chief, said that he was "100 percent certain" that the mummy belongs to Hatshepsut. “The discovery of the Hatshepsut mummy is one of the most important finds in the history of Egypt,” Dr Hawass said. “I’m sure that this mummy will help us to shed light on this mystery and on the mysterious nature of her death."

Hatshepsut ruled for 21 years from 1479 to 1458 BC after the death of her husband-brother Tuthmosis II, apparently stealing the throne from her young stepson, Thutmose III.

A woman monarch who called herself a pharaoh, dressed like a man and also wore a false beard, Hatshepsut wielded more power than two other ruling women of ancient Egypt, Cleopatra and Nefertiti, and her 21-year-reign was longer. She was one of the most prolific builder-pharaohs of ancient Egypt, commissioning hundreds of construction projects throughout both Upper and Lower Egypt, including a magnificent funerary temple of Deir el-Bahari at Luxor, dedicated to her. Almost every major museum in the world today has a collection of Hatshepsut statuary.

But when her rule in the 18th Dynasty ended, all traces of her mysteriously disappeared. Some historians theorise that the destruction of the historical records of her reign was her stepson's revenge.

In 1903, the British archaeologist Howard Carter - who later made history with his discovery of Tutankhamun - found two sarcophagi in tomb 60 in the Theban necropolis, the Valley of the Kings in Luxor. One apparently contained the mummy of Hatshepsut’s wet nurse, Sitre-In, and the other of an unknown female. Later in 1920, he found the temple of Deir el-Bahari. Mysteriously, two sarcophagi found in the temple were empty. That is where the search for Hatshepsut had ended, until Dr Hawass reinvestigated the evidence. The Discovery Channel commissioned the investigation a year ago, and helped to fund a $5 million DNA lab at the Egyptian Musum in Cairo.

The mummies from tomb 60 were brought to Cairo for the first time and Dr Hawass used CT scans to produce detailed 3D images which linked physical traits of the unidentified mummy to those of Hatshepsut’s heirs. But the definitive proof, according to Dr Hawass, was found in an ancient box inscribed with Hatshepsut's name which was discovered in 1881 at the Deir el-Bahari temple.

Inside the box were organs from the mummy and a tooth. Examined for its possible connection to a missing molar in the unidentified mummy from tomb 60, analysts found it was a near-perfect match.

The mummy identified as Hatshepsut belongs to an obese woman who died in her 50s, who probably had diabetes and is also believed to have had liver cancer, Dr Hawass said. But her left hand is positioned against her chest, in a traditional sign of royalty in ancient Egypt. “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,” Dr Hawass said.

He said the find could help to explain the mystery of Hatshepsut’s disappearance from the ancient record after her death, and the empty sarcophagi in her burial temple. “Her reign during the 18th dynasty of ancient Egypt was a prosperous one, yet mysteriously she was erased from Egyptian history,” he said.

Further tests are now under way to confirm the identification. DNA bone samples taken from the mummy’s hip bone and femur are being compared to the mummy of Hatshepsut’s grandmother, Amos Nefreteri, said Yehia Zakaria Gad, an Egyptian molecular geneticist on Dr Hawass’s team. While scientists are still matching those mitochondrial DNA sequences, Gad said that preliminary results were “very encouraging.”

Today Dr Hawass and Farouq Hosni, the Culture Minister, ceremoniously unveiled the two mummies, kept inside long glass cases draped in the Egyptian flag.

Other scientists were cautious about accepting the identification as final until futher tests had been done. “It’s a very difficult process to obtain DNA from a mummy,” said Scott Woodward, director of the Sorenson Molecular Genealogy Foundation in Salt Lake City, who has done DNA research on mummies. “To make a claim as to a relationship, you need other individuals from which you have obtained DNA, to make a comparison between the DNA sequences. It’s a difficult process but the recovery of DNA from 18th Dynasty mummies is certainly possible.”

Paul Evans, a molecular biologist at the Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah, said the discovery could, if proved, be remarkable.

“Hatshepsut is an individual who has a unique place in Egypt’s history. To have her identified is on the same magnitude as King Tut’s discovery,” he said.

And here she is:

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