It's the oldest of cold cases: A girl's death 2,200 years ago. Can modern technology explain it?

When she was rediscovered three decades ago, in a darkened storage area at Philadelphia's Academy of Natural Sciences, she caused a bit of a sensation.

Lying in a plain wooden crate was an Egyptian mummy, her gilded death mask undimmed by the passage of centuries.

The Egyptian government had restricted the export of such artefacts decades earlier, so the appearance in 1977 of a "new" one outside the country drew some interest.

X-rays taken at the time led researchers to identify the body tentatively as that of a 14-year-old girl.

But mysteries remained. When did she live, and where? How did she die? Might her dusty linen wrappings hold any clues as to her place in society, or the customs of her time?

In short, who was she?

Now, almost 30 years after the mummy was first rediscovered, new clues are starting to emerge...

There is a nice slideshow attached to this article also.

Mummy Mystery, The Philadelphia Enquirer, Pennsylvania, USA, May 22, 2006.

cf. Akhmim Mummy Studies Consortium.

An archaeological mission searching for sunken treasures in the Red sea of the Mediterranean has discovered a castle dating back to the Roman era.

The castle was discovered off the shores of the northern city of Arish, the first find of its kind in the area.

The castle was lying 30 metres beneath the water surface.

Roman castle dating back to roman era discovered, Egypt State Information Service, Egypt, May 22, 2006.

Pieced together from dozens of works of art and hieroglyphic texts carved between 1479 and 1458 B.C., the story of Hatshepsut, the princess who was crowned as a king, reads like a Shakespearean plot. It is the subject of an admirable show on view at the Metropolitan Museum of Art until July 9 [2006], punctuated by some of the most breathtaking masterpieces of Egyptian art.

Few apart from Egyptologists had heard the name "Hatshepsut," which narrowly escaped erasure from history when systematic havoc was wreaked about 20 years after her death on the statues immortalizing her strikingly beautiful features.

History sheds no light on the enigma. In the remarkable exhibition book Hatshepsut: From Queen to Pharaoh — edited by Catherine Roehrig, Renee Dreyfus and Cathleen Keller — Ann Macy Roth in her essay on Hatshepsut's predecessors notes that the king in ancient Egypt was seen as a manifestation of the male god Horus. He therefore had to be hailed as a man - which did not preclude women from ruling. Princesses had already exercised power as the "King's Mother." Two queens in the Old Kingdom, both named Khentkawes, associated this title with the phrase "King of Upper and Lower Egypt..."

The Egyptian princess who was king, International Herald Tribune, France, May 19, 2006.