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The Search for Hatshepsut and the Discovery of her Mummy Dr. Zahi Hawass June 2007.
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The Search for Hatshepsut and the Discovery of her MummyDr. Zahi HawassJune 2007
When the Discovery Channel approached me to search for the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut, I did not really think I would be able to make a definite identification. But I did think that this would give me the perfect opportunity to look at the unidentified female mummies from Dynasty 18, which no one had ever studied in as a group. There were already many theories about the identities of these mummies, but the latest scientific technology had not yet been used to study them.
Then it was time for me to go and see the original tomb of Hatshepsut, KV20. I don’t think that many people have entered this tomb. Even Egyptologists who have worked in the Valley of the Kings have avoided it, because KV20 is one of the most difficult tombs in the valley to enter, not least because of the smell of bat droppings.
The obese mummy has its left hand across the chest with its fist clenched, suggesting that it is a royal mummy (although there are non-royal mummies with their hand in that position as well). She is bald in front but has long hair in back, and is in very good condition. When I saw her, I believed at once that she was royal, but had no real opinion as to who she might be. I decided to bring this mummy to the Cairo Museum, so that she could be studied and protected there.
While I was doing CT scans in the evening at the Cairo Museum, I told the director of the Discovery Channel film on the search for Hatshepsut, that it was very important also to scan some objects from the 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.
When I saw the tooth in the box I asked Dr. Ashraf Selim to bring in a dentist right away. The dentist was a professor from Cairo University, Dr. Galal El-Beheri. He began to study the tooth, and we went back to the CT scans of all six of the unidentified female mummies, to see if any one of them was missing a tooth. Not only was the fat lady from KV60 missing a tooth, but the hole left behind and the type of tooth that was missing was an exact match for the loose one in the box from DB320! We therefore have scientific proof that this is the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut. Experts Say Egypt's Female Pharaoh Revealed by Chipped Tooth.
http://ngm.nationalgeographic.com/2009/04/hatshepsut/garrett-photography(slide show) http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2007/06/070627-hatshepsut-video.html
