Especially for her, the system of state power was changed in Ancient Egypt, where the first place until now belonged only to men. But they buried her for some reason in the coffin of the royal nurse. Computer analysis will help to identify the famous female pharaoh - and a broken tooth …
The name of Queen Hatshepsut is one of the most famous in Egyptian history. No, she was not the “only” female pharaoh, as the newspapers sometimes write about it. There were also Hentkaus, Neytikeret, Nefrusebek - before Hatshepsut and one more - Tausert - after. And yet Hatshepsut, who ruled in the 15th century. BC, surpassed them all both in terms of the scale of their personality and the originality of their history.
For the queen, who, after the early death of her husband, removed her young stepson, the future famous warrior-pharaoh Thutmose III, from the throne, the state system of royal power was adapted, in which, according to centuries-old tradition, the first place could belong exclusively to a man. Images of Hatshepsut in the guise of a male ruler with a tied ritual beard, in royal aprons and male headdresses are well known.
On the walls of her famous funeral temple, located on the western bank of the Nile in Thebes, in the natural rocky amphitheater of Deir el-Bahri, the legend of the divine birth of the queen from the god Amun, the creator of the universe, was captured.
God took the guise of her earthly father, Pharaoh Thutmose I, and looked into the bedchamber to Queen Ahmes, who from that night, recognizing the deity by the intoxicating aroma of incense and myrrh that emanated from him, carried a divine child in her womb.
The reign of Hatshepsut was successful, the Egypt of her time was prosperous. On the walls of the same snow-white temple in Deir el-Bahri, an expedition to the mysterious country of Punt, modern Somalia, was immortalized, from where the queen's fleet brought gifts from exotic African countries, including precious incense and even incense bushes in baskets of earth, which were later planted in front of the queen's temple and dedicated to her heavenly father - Amon. In Karnak, the main temple of Egypt at that time, in honor of Amun and the female pharaoh, grandiose granite obelisks were erected, brought on barges from the quarries of distant Aswan.
The mystery of the queen's mummy
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Among the many mysteries surrounding the story of Hatshepsut is the mystery of her mummy. Five centuries after the death of the queen, in the era of civil strife and the crisis of statehood, the priests of Amun transferred many of the royal remains from their ancestral tombs to caches hidden in the rocks. Meanwhile, neither in the famous "royal hiding place" in Deir el-Bahri, nor in the tomb of Pharaoh Amenhotep II in the Valley of the Kings, where the bodies of other rulers were also dumped, the mummies of Hatshepsut were not found.
In the unfinished tomb of a female pharaoh in the Valley of the Kings in 1920, the archaeologist Howard Carter, having barely overcome 213 meters of its corridors and chambers, found two empty very beautiful quartzite sarcophagi. One was intended for Hatshepsut herself, the other, judging by the inscriptions, for her father, Thutmose I.
Earlier, in 1903, Carter faced another mystery related to Hatshepsut: in one of the abandoned tombs in the Valley of the Kings, he found two sarcophagi. One belonged to the nurse Hatshepsut, the noble lady Satra In, and there was still a female body in it. In the second, unnamed, lay another woman. The find did not arouse particular interest in Carter. Three years later, another archaeologist, Edward Ayrton, reopened the tomb and sent the Satra In sarcophagus with the body to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. The tomb was forgotten.
Only in 1989, archaeologist David Ryan, having received permission from the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt, opened the ravaged tomb. The second mummy was lying on the floor among the burial sheets. The well-preserved body of a plump woman with long hair peeling from the shriveled skin on her skull was swaddled in excellent linen.
At that time, the attention of all Egyptologists was attracted by one important detail: one hand of the mummy, the right one, lay across the chest, the left one was extended along the body; it was in this position that the ancient Egyptians buried their queens. The only strange thing was that the left hand had to be on the chest; here everything was the other way around.
Wasn't Hatshepsut reburied in the tomb of her wet nurse? This has been discussed more than once. Many factors, on which Egyptologist Elizabeth Thomas dwelt in her research, showed that this mummy was buried during the 18th dynasty, to which Hatshepsut belonged, the body posture is royal, part of the wooden mask of Hatshepsut's sarcophagus was found in the same tomb …
Is the mummy an imposter?
However, when the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities (AHC) began a five-year project to examine mummies held in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, there was hope that the two women would be identified. “In the Valley of the Kings, I visited the sixtieth tomb with Egyptologist Salima Ikram,” recalls Dr. Zahi Hawass, head of the BSA, “to investigate the mummy left there and prepare a documentary.
In search of Hatshepsut's mummy
The researchers went down the half-worn rough steps, walked along a corridor roughly carved into the rock, and with difficulty entered the burial chamber, which seemed to be designed to hide the royal body from the eyes of the robbers."
"Although Elizabeth Thomas believes that Hatshepsut owns the mummy left in Ayrton's tomb, which is supported by David Ryan," continues Dr. Hawass, "I do not believe it is the queen's mummy." According to him, the body is too massive, does not correspond to the images of Hatshepsut, huge breasts are more suitable for a royal nurse than for a queen, known for her grace, and, finally, a regal pose can be just a sign of respect, which was accompanied on the last journey by the lady who once fed the great queen …
Confusion unraveled
Only after that did the curators of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo take a closer look at the body that was moved to Cairo from the Valley of the Kings in the Satra In sarcophagus. It was kept on the third floor of the museum, closed to visitors. In a massive sarcophagus, inscribed with the titles of the royal nurse and having a length of 2.13 meters, lay a miniature mummy only 1.5 meters tall.
The sarcophagus was completely unsuitable for her, but the body of a stout lady from the Valley of the Kings would fit perfectly into it. The fragile woman's right hand was stretched out along the body, and the left one lay on her stomach, as if initially holding the "hetes" - the queen's ceremonial scepter.
Long hair is perfectly preserved on the woman's head. The body was swaddled in fabric of the highest quality, the fingers were swaddled separately, as was often the case in Egypt with royal bodies. But at the bottom of the sarcophagus lay scraps of completely different shroud, of much worse quality.
Both bodies are now being examined using a tomograph and many modern technologies. For the first time, in order to determine which body belongs to the famous queen, Egypt gave permission to analyze the DNA of both mummies. The work is carried out exclusively by Egyptian specialists.
And one more interesting fact that not everyone knows about. The mummy of a fragile woman in excellent swaddling clothes has a broken tooth. It was this tooth, apparently, that was found in a box with an embalmed human liver, found in 1881 in a royal cache in the Deir el-Bahri gorge. On the surface of the box, the names of the great Queen Hatshepsut, the First among the venerable, are perfectly preserved. The history of antiquity is amazing: sometimes the fate of the royal remains depends on one tooth.
Author: A. Rybalchenko. “Interesting newspaper. Mysteries of Civilization №22