In my search for Hatshepsut, the first thing that I did was look at
the mummies from KV60, which is a small, undecorated tomb located in
front of KV20, the real tomb of Hatshepsut. KV60 is actually a perfect
cache for the reburial of mummies. Howard Carter, the discoverer of the
tomb of Tutankhamun, had excavated this tomb in 1903, and found two
mummies here: one, a small woman, was found inside an 18th Dynasty
coffin inscribed for a royal nurse, In; the other was a hugely obese
woman, discovered on the floor next to In’s coffin. We know from
other sources that Hatshepsut’s wet-nurse was named Sitre-In, and
that the last two letters of this name appeared on the coffin from KV60;
based on this fact, and the location of KV 60 close to KV 20,
Egyptologist Elizabeth Thomas had already suggested that the obese mummy
could be Hatshepsut...
Someone (perhaps Ayrton) had moved the coffin and mummy of the wet
nurse to the Cairo Museum. With the help of the curator in charge of
mummies at the museum, Someya Abdel Someia, I found them in storage on
the third floor. The manner of mummification was excellent, but to me
her face and features did not look particularly royal.
I then began to look at other unidentified New Kingdom female mummies
that might be royal. Two of these were found in the cache of royal
mummies found at Deir el-Bahari, DB320...
While I was doing these CT scans in the evening at the Cairo Museum,
I told Brando Quilici, the director of the Discovery Channel film on the
search for Hatshepsut, that it was very important also to scan some
objects from these tombs, to find out more about them. The first objects
that were brought to me were Hatshepsut’s canopic jars, and we put
them under the machine. The last thing that we scanned was the wooden
box bearing her cartouches that was found inside the DB320 cache.
It turned out that this box held the key to the riddle. To our
surprise, in addition to mummified viscera, there was a single tooth
inside the box. We know from other “embalming caches” that
anything associated with a body or its mummification became ritually
charged, and had to be buried properly. Therefore, it seemed that during
the mummification of Queen Hatshepsut, the embalmers put into the box
anything that came loose from the body during the mummification process.
The other surprise in the box confirmed this: it contained not only the
liver but other, unidentified organic material, probably from the
queen’s body...
Egyptology Blog
