Tooth May Have Solved Mummy Mystery

A single tooth and some DNA clues appear to have solved the mystery of the lost mummy of Hatshepsut, one of the great queens of ancient Egypt, who reigned in the 15th century B.C.

Archaeologists who conducted the research, to be announced formally today in Cairo, said this was the first mummy of an Egyptian ruler to be found and “positively identified” since King Tutankhamun’s tomb was opened in 1922.

Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo, said Monday in a telephone interview that the mummy was found in 1903 in an obscure, undecorated tomb in the Valley of the Kings, across the Nile from modern Luxor, and had been largely overlooked for more than a century.

Dr. Hawass said the identification of the well-preserved mummy as Hatshepsut (pronounced hat-shep-SOOT) was made a few weeks ago when a CT scan of a wooden box associated with the queen revealed a tooth. The tooth, he said, “fits exactly” into the jaw socket and broken root of the mummy of an obese woman originally found in Tomb 60 at the Valley of the Kings, the necropolis for royalty in the New Kingdom before and after Hatshepsut’s reign.

“We therefore have scientific proof that this is the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut,” Dr. Hawass concluded, citing primarily the tooth but also current DNA analysis suggesting a family relationship between the obese woman and Ahmose Nefertari, the matriarch of 18th dynasty royalty.

Other Egyptologists not involved in the project said that the finding was fascinating, but that they would reserve judgment until they had studied the results of the DNA analysis and had some of the evidence confirmed by other researchers.

“You have to be so careful in reaching conclusions from such data,” said Kathryn Bard, an Egyptologist at Boston University.

Dr. Bard said, however, that it was not surprising that Hatshepsut’s mummy would turn up in a humble tomb, not the more elaborate one presumably intended for her. She noted that the queen’s stepson Thutmose III, after he succeeded to the throne on her death, “tried to destroy every trace of her and her reign,” so it was likely that her preserved body was hidden in another burial chamber for safekeeping.

The search for Hatshepsut’s mummy by Egyptian archaeologists and medical scientists will be described in a television program, “Secrets of the Lost Queen of Egypt,” scheduled for July 15 on the Discovery Channel.

As Dr. Hawass tells the story, he was approached by the Discovery Channel to apply new scientific technology to the search for the lost mummy. He thought the odds of success were slim, but looked upon the project as an opportunity to investigate a collection of unidentified female mummies in tombs and in the Cairo Museum.

To the frustration of archaeologists, royal Egyptian mummies were often moved from their original tombs and hidden in less conspicuous ones to stymie would-be plunderers. Identifying marks were frequently lost in the transfer.

Dr. Hawass and his team began the search at Tomb 60. Howard Carter, the British archaeologist who discovered the King Tut tomb, had excavated these smaller chambers in 1903. He found two mummies there: one in a coffin inscribed for a royal nurse, the other stretched out on the floor.

On a recent visit to Tomb 60, Dr. Hawass examined the mummy that had been on the floor, the obese one. Her left arm was bent at the elbow, with the hand over her chest. Her right arm lay against her side. The fingernails of the left hand were painted red and outlined in black. She was bald in front, with long hair in back.

Seeing the arrangement of her arms, Dr. Hawass said, “I believed at once that she was royal, but had no real opinion as to who she might be.”

Other Egyptologists also saw the left arm on the chest as a royal characteristic. But Dr. Bard of Boston University said that royal mummies were usually laid out with both hands crossed at the chest.

In the search, Dr. Hawass had radiologists make CT scans of six unidentified female mummies as well as some objects associated with them. The last of these examined objects was a wooden box bearing the name Hatshepsut. The box had been recovered from yet another tomb.

The container held some of the viscera removed from the body during embalming. Everything associated with a royal body or its mummification was carefully and ritually preserved. Late one night recently, the box was subjected to the CT scan.

“It turned out that this box held the key to the riddle,” Dr. Hawass said.

The images revealed a well-preserved liver and the tooth. A dentist, Dr. Galal El-Beheri of Cairo University, was called in. He studied the images of the mummy collection, and the tooth seemed to belong to the obese mummy.

Further CT scans led physicians to conclude that the woman was about 50 when she died. She was overweight and had bad teeth. She probably had diabetes and died of bone cancer, which had spread through her body.

Dr. Hawass said the DNA research into the possible Hatshepsut mummy was continuing, and he was vague about when the results would be reported. But early tests of mitochondrial DNA, he said, showed a relationship between the mummy and the matriarch Ahmose Nefertari.

Myth and History Archaeological findings, not the tomb of King Khufu's Pyramid Pharaoh?

In general, historians have argued that the pyramid has a close relationship with the pharaoh's tomb. Because the pyramid is saving an odd power. Can make a corpse with a rapid dehydration, speed up the process of becoming fossilized mummy.

But let's look at his background, since the 6th century BC, Egypt was the refuge Poshi empire, who lost his position after standing more than 2,000 years, to receive power from outside the kingdom of Greece, Rome, the Islamic kingdom and the power of other nations. During that time a large number of famous works of Pharaoh destroyed, literacy and religious beliefs of the Egyptians themselves were gradually replaced by other cultures, so that the culture of ancient Egypt to be receding and destroyed, generations later also lost a large number of relics that can decipher clues left by the predecessors.

Year 450 BC, after a Greek historian around and arrived in Egypt, whose writings: Cheops (Khufu Greek alphabet), it is said he said, were destroyed after 50 years. In a certain limit the Greek historian uses the phrase "it is said, she-said, meaning that the truth needs to be proven again. However, since it is the opinion of the Greek historians quote generations later even became as important evidence that the pyramids were royal dynasty founded in the 4th.

Until now, historians thought that the pyramid is the tomb of the king. Thus, so talk about the pyramid, which is imagined in the unconscious mind is the jewelry and stuff that glitters. And, in the year 820 AD, when the governor-general of Islamic Cairo Caliph al-Ma'mun lead the troops, first dig a secret passageway and into the pyramid, and when it impatiently into the room, a view which looks only made him very disappointed. Not only did no one object that is usually buried with the body, such as pearls, and carvings, even a piece of pottery fragments were not there, that there is only an empty stone coffin with no lid. While the wall was just a clean field blank, nor was there any carved inscription.

Conclusion historians to achievement first entered this pyramid is "experiencing robbery objects in the tomb. " However, the results indicate a real investigation, the possibility of thieves entered the tomb of the pyramid through the other road is very small. Under normal conditions, the thief's tomb is also not possible to steal without leaving a trace, and more is no longer possible to delete the entire inscription Pharaoh depicted on the wall. Compared with other tombs which are generally filled with jewels and treasures abound, a giant pyramid built to commemorate the greatness of Pharaoh king became very different.

In addition, the note "Inventory Stela", which is stored in the museum of Cairo, had mentioned that the pyramid has been around since the beginning before the throne of Khufu continuing. However, because the notes on the stone inscription is strongly challenged the traditional view, there is a problem between the results of research experts and ways of writing the book, then strongly criticized the value of research. Actually, the limitations of historical record that can be obtained, if for a certain look and then set aside some historical evidence, has unwittingly hold us objectively in view of the position of the actual history.

Mummies Back from the Dead

Bodies donated to science generally serve as interactive textbooks for the next generation of doctors, providing them one litigation-free chance to let their spectacles fall into a patient's thoracic cavity. But some corpses go beyond the call of duty. Among these, one corpse at the University of Maryland School of Medicine particularly stands out. Thirteen years ago, the donor—then a man in his seventies—died of a stroke, and the body was handed over to Bob Brier, an Egyptologist at Long Island University, and Ronald Wade, director of the Maryland State Anatomy Board. After removing and pickling all the organs except the heart, Brier and Wade buried the body under hundreds of pounds of natron (basically baking soda and salt) for 30 days to dehydrate it. Once they removed the clumps of soggy natron, Brier and Wade sprinkled the desiccated body with frankincense and myrrh. What they ended up with looks a lot like a Hollywood monster, and indeed, it is the first authentic Egyptian-style mummy created in over 2,000 years.

Bob Brier and Andrea Corthals examine the thoroughly modern mummy.
Courtesy of Bob Brier

Brier and Wade took great pains to try to authentically recreate the ancient Egyptian process of mummification, with Brier reciting sacred prayers as they wrapped the body tightly in straps of linen. If the ancient incantations worked, the man’s spirit has long since passed through the treacherous Egyptian underworld and united with his eternal body in the afterlife, where he can now gaze down at his shriveled mortal remains. No doubt he would be proud of what he saw: The "thoroughly modern mummy," as Brier and Wade call it, has helped to decrypt the long-lost Egyptian mummification procedure and provided an invaluable guide for scientists who handle the remains of ancient humans.

Until Brier and Wade discovered the technique, no one was quite sure how the Egyptians had so successfully preserved their dead—nor had anyone really tried for over 2,000 years. Although Herodotus had penned a rough outline of the gruesome ritual in his Histories, the priests and embalmers who actually performed it left no record of their trade. According to Brier, it was almost as if no one thought it was possible to learn more. “When I started going to Egypt, I realized that nobody really knew how mummification took place,” he says. “Nobody was talking about it. So that’s how I realized that you really have to do a mummification to figure it out.”