More than 300 foreign and Egyptian journalists, TV crews,
photographers, Egyptologists and scientists gathered in front of the
Egyptian Museum hoping for a glimpse of the mummy of Egypt's best known
female ruler, Hatshepsut.
The object of their interest lay in a sandstone sarcophagus, one arm
folded across her chest, a face frozen in the mask of death: thus it is
that Queen Hatshepsut silently greets her visitors after spending 3,500
years unattended inside the modest undecorated tomb of her Wet Nurse
Sittre-In (KV60), located in the Valley of the Kings on Luxor's West
Bank...
With the launch two years ago of the Supreme Council of Antiquities
(SCA) five-year mummy project, involving CT-scans of a large number of
mummies, it was decided the obese woman of KV60 should be among
them.
"Last year, when Discovery Channel approached me about searching for
the mummy of Hatshepsut, I did not think I would be able to make a
definite identification but it would give me an opportunity to examine
unidentified female mummies from the 18th Dynasty, which no one has
studied as a group," SCA Secretary- General Zahi Hawass told Al-Ahram
Weekly. He pointed out that although there were many theories about the
identities of these mummies none of them had been tested against the
latest scientific technology.
"I had to depend on a team of skilled Egyptologists, radiologists,
anatomists, pathologists and forensic expert," Hawass continues...
Mummies believed to be most closely related to Hatshepsut were also
scanned, including those thought to be of Thutmose II and III. The first
was Hatshepsut's husband, and probably her half- brother, the second her
stepson. The result of the scans, reveals Hawass, shows that Thutmose II
was suffering from heart disease which led to his early death. The
mummies thought to be those of Hatshepsut's father and her grandmother,
Thutmose I and Ahmose- Nefertari, were also scanned.
Hawass said that CT-scans indicate that the mummy which was once
believed to be that of King Thutmose I, Hatshepsut's father, is not
actually his. The scans show that the mummy belongs to a young man who
was not placed in the royal pose of mummification, and had the remains
of an arrow embedded in his chest, implying that he had been killed,
whereas Thutmose I died of natural causes. The mummy is that of a man
who died at the age of 40, making it impossible for him to be
Hatshepsut's father...
Following the mummy scans, Hawass ordered a re-examination of
funerary objects associated with Hatshepsut, including Canopic jars
found in tomb KV20 and a small wooden box bearing her cartouches found
with the DB320 cache.
"The box eventually held the key to the riddle," says Hawass...
