[music] In the Valley of the Kings, the cliffs hide the tombs of Egypt’s greatest rulers.
[music] In 1903, Howard Carter entered one of the smallest.
Robbers had ransacked it.
One woman lay in a coffin.
Another lay on the floor, unnamed, her left arm bent across her chest.
Carter sealed the tomb and walked away.
For a century, she remained nameless.
In 2007, near midnight in Cairo, a sealed box bearing a royal name went into a CT scanner.
[music] Inside was something no one expected, a single tooth.
That tooth would return a name to Hot Shepsut, the 18th dynasty [music] queen who made herself king.
Why was she erased from history?
Why did both of her tombs lie empty?
How did Egypt’s woman king end up on the floor of her nurse’s tomb?
And is it truly her?
Stay to the end and tell us where in the world you’re watching from.
On June 27th, 2007, reporters crowded into the Egyptian Museum in Cairo for an announcement that Egypt’s antiquity service had been building toward for more than a year.
At the front of the room lay two long glass cases, each draped in the Egyptian flag.
Beside them stood Zahi Hawas, then Secretary General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities and Culture Minister Farukq Hosni.
When the flags came off, the cases revealed two female mummies.
One of them, Hawas declared, was Hachepsut, the woman who had ruled Egypt as king in the 15th century BC.
Writing for the New York Times, John Noble Wilford reported that a single tooth and some DNA clues appeared to have solved the mystery of the lost queen.
The researchers called her the first mummy of an Egyptian ruler to be found and positively identified since the opening of Tuten Commons tomb in 1922.
The entire search had been filmed for a Discovery Channel documentary, Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen, which aired in the United States that July.
The evidence at the center of the announcement was remarkably small.
Among the objects linked to Hachepsut was a little wooden box inscribed with her royal names recovered generations earlier from a hidden cache of royal mummies near Luxor.
When the team passed it through a CT scanner, the images showed mummified organs inside, a liver, and part of the intestine.
They also showed a molar broken with one of its roots missing.
The team then turned to the scans of an unidentified woman who had been carried out of the Valley of the Kings only 2 months earlier.
Her upper jaw had a gap where a moler should have been and lodged in that gap was a single broken root.
Has told reporters that the measurements matched and that the density of the tooth was the same as her remaining teeth.
“We are 100% certain,” he told the Associated Press.
“Yet the most startling part of the story was where the body had been all along.”
Hawas told the New York Times that the mummy had been found in 1903 in an obscure undecorated tomb in the Valley of the Kings across the Nile from modern Luxor and that it had been largely overlooked for more than a century.
Archaeologists had seen her, recorded the tomb, and moved on.
To bring her to Cairo, Hawas broke with his own practice.
According to the Guardian, he described her as the only mummy he had ever removed from the Valley of the Kings.
That raises the question at the heart of this investigation.
How does one of the most powerful rulers in Egyptian history disappear so completely that her own body lies in plain sight for a hundred years and no one knows who she is.
To understand how Hatcheps vanished, the investigation has to begin with how she rose.
She was born a princess, the daughter of King Thutmos I.
During the 18th dynasty, at the dawn of the era historians call Egypt’s new kingdom, as was common in the royal family, she married her half-brother, Thutmos II, and became his principal queen.
According to biography, K.
His death left Hacheps a widow before the age of 30.
The heir was a young boy, Thut Moses III, the son of Tutmos II, by a secondary wife.
Egyptologist Peter Dorman of the University of Chicago has argued that the king’s death was probably unforeseen, leaving an heir who may have been little more than a nursing infant.
The clue, Dorman notes, is that that Moses III went on to reign for more than 53 years, a span that makes sense only if he came to the throne as a very small child.
Hatepsut began as the boy’s regent.
Then she attempted something few royal women had ever dared.
According to the thean mapping project, in about the second year of the boy’s reign, she took the title of pharaoh for herself and she ruled Egypt until her death roughly 20 years later.
On the walls of her temple at Dear Albahari, she justified the move by claiming divine birth, presenting the god Ammon as her true father and the source of her right to the throne.
Because the Egyptian word for king and the royal costume were masculine, her statues sometimes show a male body and a ceremonial false beard, and her inscriptions refer to her with both masculine and feminine pronouns.
She governed with the help of her steward and architect, Senmut.
In the ninth year of her reign, she sent a trading expedition to the distant land of Punt, and the reliefs at Deir Albahari show her ships returning with living incense trees.
She raised towering obelisks at the great temple of Cararnak.
As the Associated Press noted in 2007, almost every major museum in the world today holds statues of Hutepsut.
And then after she died around 1458 BC, that record began to disappear.
Her name was chiseled from her monuments.
According to the Theban Mapping Project, she was deliberately left out of later lists of Egypt’s kings.
At Carnac, walls went up around her obelisks so they could no longer be seen.
For more than a century of modern scholarship, the accepted explanation was simple and dramatic.
Thutmosas III, the stepson whose throne she had taken, waited until she was gone and then tried to destroy every trace of her reign.
And many feared that her body had been lost or destroyed along with her name.
That is version one of this story, the official account that stood for generations.
To test it, investigators had to follow the trail to the place where her body should have been.
Her tomb, and Hot Shepsut, it turns out, had two.
The first tomb was carved while she was still a queen.
In October 1916, local diggers found an entrance in a remote side valley west of the Valley of the Kings in a place now called Wadi Sikat, Taka, Elzade.
Howard Carter, six years before he found Toutin Common, went to investigate on behalf of his patron, Lord Carnarvin.
According to the Thean mapping project, the entrance was cut high in a cliff face about 230 ft above the valley floor.
Inside, Carter found an undecorated tomb and a massive quartzite sarcophagus inscribed for Hat Shepsuit as great royal wife, its lid set to one side.
The tomb had been abandoned.
Once she became king, a queen’s tomb was no longer fitting, and the sarcophagus never received a body.
Exciting idea that tested.
It rests in the Egyptian museum in Cairo, an empty coffin for a woman who outgrew it.
The second tomb was meant to be her eternal home as Pharaoh.
Known today as KV20, it is one of the most unusual tombs in the Valley of the Kings.
A series of steep curving corridors driven deep into the cliffs immediately west of her temple at Dear El Bahari.
Carter cleared it completely in 1903 and 1904 and as Egypt’s Alaham later recounted, the work was so difficult that he remembered the stench of bat droppings.
At the bottom, he found two quartzsite sarcophagi, one for Hatchepsut and one that had been recut for her father, Tutmosa I, so that father and daughter could share the tomb.
The recut sarcophagus is now in the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston.
It is more than 7 ft long and weighs about 6,000 lb.
Both sarcophagi were empty.
The king, who built one of the most admired temples in Egypt, had prepared two tombs, and neither held her body.
Where had the royal bodies gone?
Part of the answer came to light in 1881.
For years, villagers near Luxor had been plundering a secret tomb and selling its treasures.
A family quarrel finally exposed the source.
And on July 6th, 1881, officials, including Emile Bug and Ahmed Kamal, one of Egypt’s first Egyptologists, were led to a hidden shaft near Dar El Bahari.
Inside was the royal cache, now known as TT320, holding the remains anderary equipment of more than 50 kings, queens, and members of the royal family.
Priests of the 21st dynasty had gathered them there centuries after their deaths to protect them from tomb robbers.
11 pharaohs were found there, including five kings of Hachepsut’s own 18th dynasty.
The mummies became a highlight of Egypt’s National Museum, and the story of their discovery was later dramatized in the 1969 Egyptian film, The Night of Counting the Years.
Among the objects recovered was a small wooden box bearing Hot Shepsut’s royal names.
Her body, however, was never recognized among the mummies.
That leaves a puzzle worth pausing on.
If ancient priests went to such lengths to rescue the bodies of Egypt’s kings, where would they hide a king whose name had been erased?
Hold that question because the answer may lie in another tomb Carter opened in that same valley in the spring of 1903.
In the spring of 1903, working for the Egyptian Antiquity Service on behalf of the American businessman Theodore Davis, Howard Carter cleared the entrance to a small tomb in the Valley of the Kings, close to the tomb known as KV19.
It would be numbered KV60.
Rough steps led steeply down from a cliff in the hillside into a corridor and a low unfinished burial chamber.
Ancient robbers had been there first.
The excavation records describe a burial that had been ransacked and desecrated, but two female mummies remained.
One lay in the base of a wooden coffin.
The other lay on the floor.
Around them were the remains of the funeral, including mummified geese, and as the Theban mapping project records, a side of beef in a small side chamber.
Carter judged the tomb unremarkable.
He sealed it again and carried away only the mummified geese.
3 years later, in 1906, the archaeologist Edward Erton, also excavating for Davis, reopened the tomb while clearing neighboring KV19.
He removed the woman lying in the coffin along with the coffin base and sent her to the Egyptian museum in Cairo.
Her coffin carried an inscription linking her to Satra Inn, the royal wet nurse who had cared for Hot Sheps as a child, and she has been associated with that name ever since.
She is a striking figure, a small woman about 4’9 in tall.
Robbers had torn away much of her linen, which was found heaped at the foot of her coffin.
Yet her fingers remain individually wrapped and her face seems almost a smile.
The woman on the floor stayed where she was.
Then something remarkable happened.
Neither Carter nor Erton drew a plan or a map showing where the tomb was.
Over the following decades, KV60 simply dropped out of the record.
A tomb in one of the most intensively studied cemeteries on Earth had been lost.
Consider what that meant for the woman left behind.
Above her, the Valley of the Kings became one of the most famous archaeological sites in the world.
In 1922, in the same valley, Carter opened the tomb of Tuten Common and set off a global sensation.
Visitors arrived by the millions.
Scholars debated where Hachepsut’s body might be.
All the while, an unnamed woman lay on the floor of a forgotten tomb, her wrappings torn by robbers, her left arm bent across her chest.
Whoever she had been in life, no one had written it down.
Then in 1966, an Egyptologist began to wonder whether the woman on the floor was the missing king herself.
Her name was Elizabeth Thomas, and in 1966, she published a sweeping study of the royal cemeteries of ancient thieves.
In it, she pointed to the oddity of KV60, a modest tomb linked to Hatchepsut’s nurse that also held a second unnamed woman.
Thomas became the first to propose that this second mummy was Hatchepsut herself, relocated to the tomb of her old nurse by Thutmos III as part of his campaign against her memory.
It was a bold idea and an elegant one.
A king whose name was being erased could be hidden or discarded beside the servant who had raised her.
But with the tomb lost and the mummy unexamined, no one could test it.
For more than 20 years, the theory of Elizabeth Thomas sat on the page waiting.
In June 1989, an archaeologist from Pacific Lutheran University in Tacoma, Washington, set out to find the lost tomb.
Donald Ryan was focusing on the small undecorated tombs of the Valley of the Kings that most excavators had ignored.
Ryan had worked for years alongside the Norwegian explorer Thor Hired Doll and he co-directed the KV60 work with archaeologist Mark Papworth.
Recalling the search years later, Ryan said Carter had found Hun KV60 boring and simply covered it up.
On the very first day, Ryan’s team swept a broom across the ground and saw the outline of a pit cut into the bedrock.
They had found KV60.
Inside, the scene was much as Carter had left it.
A pile of mummified food offerings opposite the entrance, and in the center of the floor, a lone female mummy about 4.9 ft tall.
Robbers had torn away much of her wrapping.
Her left arm was bent across her chest, a pose that many Egyptologists associate with royal women of the 18th dynasty.
It was exactly the kind of detail that could build a case.
And Ryan refused to overstate it.
In a 1990 article in the Egyptology journal KMT titled, “Who is buried in KV60?”
He warned that declaring the mummy to be Hot Shepsut would be foolishly premature.
She could, he suggested, be any of a number of royal women or nurses of the period.
The 1989 excavation, in fact, produced evidence both for and against the idea.
One intriguing detail was later reported by the British magazine Current World Archaeology.
The mummy wore a wooden face piece that may once have held a false beard, the kind hatchepsuit wore as king.
That detail rests on a single magazine report and should be treated as unverified.
His team built a simple wooden coffin, placed her inside, and sealed the tomb behind a new metal cover.
Three decades later, in a 2019 retrospective, Ryan went further.
He suggested that if Elizabeth Thomas had never raised Hatchepsut’s name, KV60 might have been readily accepted as the burial of a royal nurse and a singer.
A posture can raise a question, but it cannot answer one.
To name the woman on the floor, investigators would need evidence that no human eye could see.
That evidence would come from medicine.
In the mid200s, Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities launched a 5-year project to CT scan royal mummies.
And according to Alaham, Hwas said Hotepsut seemed the perfect place to start.
The technology came with powerful partners.
NPR reported that the CT scanner had been donated by the National Geographic Society and that the Discovery Channel funded a DNA laboratory in the basement of the Cairo Museum, which Alazer put at $5 million.
The Associated Press described the work as the first attempt in Egypt to use DNA analysis to verify the identity of a mummy.
According to the Associated Press, Discovery paid for the lab in exchange for exclusive rights to film the search.
That arrangement is worth keeping in mind.
In early 2007, the team reopened KV60 and brought the woman from the floor to Cairo for scanning, two months before the world would hear her name.
The investigation started with Hatchepsut’s family.
And almost immediately, it produced a shock.
For more than a century, a mummy from the royal cash had been labeled as her father, Thutmosa I.
According to Allaram, the scans showed a man who had died at about 40, which made it impossible for him to be Hot Shepsut’s father.
Speaking to NPR, Hawas went further, saying the body had an arrow in its chest and was not royal at all.
The family reference that investigators had hoped to use was gone.
Then came a more personal admission.
NPR noted that not long before, Hawas had told an audience at the Metropolitan Museum of Art that he believed Hot Shepsut was a mummy gathering dust on the third floor of the Cairo Museum.
Now, he said he had been wrong.
Even the man leading the hunt had once picked the wrong woman.
According to the Discovery Channel’s own announcement, the team used what was known of royal mummification along with clues from Hotepsut’s two tombs to narrow thousands of unidentified bodies down to just four.
All four were unidentified royal women of roughly the right period.
Archaeology magazine reviewing the Discovery Channel documentary listed them with the nicknames the production gave them.
From KV60 came the woman from the floor, dubbed the strong one, and the woman from the nurse’s coffin.
From the royal cash came two more.
One called the screaming one because her mouth is open, and one called the serene one.
Here is the evidence as it stood.
Two of the women came from the hidden cache where Hatchepsut’s box was found.
One had been buried in a coffin linked to her nurse.
One had been left on a tomb floor with her arm bent in a royal pose.
Based on that alone, which would you choose?
Investigators would not have to guess.
The answer was waiting in a box that had sat in the museum’s collection for more than a century.
A box no one had ever looked inside.
According to Discover magazine, the breakthrough began late one night.
Alone in the Egyptian museum near midnight, Hawas decided to scan a box bearing Hachepsut’s name.
Egyptian imbalmer usually preserved a body’s internal organs separately and this small wooden box recovered with the royal cash in 1881 was believed to hold her liver.
The CT images confirmed the liver and part of the intestine.
Then they revealed something no one had expected, a single moler with one of its roots broken away.
To explain it, the team pointed to the woman from the floor of KV60.
Her upper jaw held a gap where a moler was missing with the broken stump of a root still inside.
The tooth appears to have been abscessed and pulled shortly before her death.
When the imbalmers prepared her body, they seemed to have kept the extracted tooth and sealed it away with her organs, preserved as part of her internity.
To test the match, Has called in Galal Elahari, a professor of orthodontics at Cairo University.
Elahari examined the CT scans of the tooth and of the candidate mummies looking for a woman missing that moler.
Only one fit.
According to the Guardian, Hawas said the woman from KV60 was missing a tooth and that both the hole left behind and the type of tooth missing matched the loose mer in the box.
As the team described it, the tooth matched the jaws remaining mers in size, shape, and density.
And the root left in the jaw corresponded to the root missing from the tooth.
A later account by the French historian of medicine Xavier Rio drawing on Hwass’s own reports gave the width of the tooth fragment as 1.6 cm against a space of 1.7 cm in the jaw.
That is about 0.63 in of tooth in a gap of about 0.67 in.
Pause on those numbers because they invite a fair question.
If the tooth belongs in that socket.
Why does it fall short by about 125th of an inch?
The team offered an answer.
According to the Guardians account, the tiny difference could be explained by erosion of the gum after the tooth was pulled.
At the press conference, Hawas put the fit closer still, telling Reuters the measurements matched to within 4/10 of a millimeter, about 164th of an inch.
The two figures do not agree perfectly, and both come from the team itself.
For the investigators though, the case was closed.
Molecular biologist Paul Evans of Brigham Y Young University in Utah told the Associated Press that identifying Hutch would be on the same magnitude as the discovery of King Tut.
After roughly 3,500 years, the woman on the floor had her name back, and her body was ready to tell investigators how Egypt’s woman king had died.
The CT scans produced a portrait very different from the slim, idealized figure carved on Hachepsut’s statues.
According to the Guardian, the woman from KV60 was obese and between 45 and 60 years old when she died with bad teeth.
Alaharam described her forehead as shaved with long hair left at the back of her head.
She stood about 4.9 ft tall.
Even her imbalming reflected her size.
According to the analysis by Hwas and radiologist Sahar Salem in their book scanning the pharaohs, her imbalmers removed her organs through the pelvic floor instead of through the usual incision in the side, perhaps because of her weight, and they left her brain in place.
The body of a king had been prepared in an unusual way, and the scans hinted at how hard her final years had been.
The scans pointed to serious illness.
The Guardian reported evidence of cancer in the pelvic region and the spine.
The Associated Press, quoting Hawas, described her as probably diabetic and believed to have had liver cancer.
Discover magazine summarized the findings as obesity, likely diabetes, and bone cancer with death at about age 50.
Those accounts differ in their details and the full scan data has never been released in peer-reviewed form.
So each should be treated as the team’s interpretation.
One scientist connected to the project proposed a different killer altogether.
Angelique Corthalss, a biomedical Egyptologist then at the University of Manchester told Discover that at a time when tooth infections could be fatal, she believed the abscess tooth itself had killed Hatchepsut.
If she is right, the tooth that identified the queen may also be what ended her life and the old legend that Tutmosa III murdered her loses its foundation.
In 2011, a third possibility emerged from a museum in Germany.
The Egyptian Museum of the University of Bon holds a small flask whose inscription links it to Hotepsut.
Curator Michael Hover Müller had its CT scanned at the university’s radiology clinic, then sampled the dried residue inside with an endoscope.
For years, the vessel had been assumed to be a perfume bottle.
After 2 years of analysis, the team concluded that it had held something very different.
Pharmarmacologist Helmet Weedenfeld identified palm oil and nutmeg oil, fats of the kind used to soothe skin conditions such as eczema along with benzo pyne, a compound he described as one of the most dangerous carcinogens known.
The bond release noted that creassote, a tar derived substance of the same family, has since been banned from cosmetics and that medicines containing it are now available only by prescription.
The Bond team suggested that if the queen used such a lotion for years, she may have slowly exposed herself to a cancer-causing substance.
It is a striking idea, and it remains an unverified hypothesis.
The researchers said they could only speculate about how Hatcheps obtained the lotion and the flasks linked to her rests on its inscription.
So, which was it?
Cancer, diabetes, an infected tooth, or a poisoned skin cream?
Share in the comments which explanation you think the evidence supports best.
From the first day, some of the most respected voices in Egyptology urged caution.
Selma Ikram, head of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, told NPR she would call it a tentative identification.
She considered the apparent tooth match probably the best evidence to date, but she had reservations about whether ancient DNA methods were reliable enough yet.
DNA was supposed to be the clincher.
Molecular geneticist Yahi Gad, a member of Hwas’s team, said bone samples had been taken from the mummy’s pelvis and thighbone for comparison with Queen Ammo Nefertari, the revered matriarch of the dynasty and one of Hatepsut’s ancestors.
In July 2007, the University of Manchester announced that preliminary results supported the identification.
Months later, however, the Associated Press reported that Corals described the results as very good but preliminary and said it would still take months to verify they were not a fluke.
The AP summarized the evidence with care.
The mummy was most likely, but not conclusively, hot Shepsut.
The obstacles were formidable.
From the sheer age of the DNA to the constant danger of contamination by modern genetic material, those months turned into years.
In her 2013 book, The Shadow King, science journalist Joe Merchant reported that most Egyptologists she had spoken to were very skeptical that the mummy had anything to do with Hatchepsoot and that neither the CT scans nor the DNA results had been published in a scientific journal.
The DNA researchers, she noted, were open about their results being too preliminary to publish.
The Egyptology writer Dylan Bickerstaff argued that the join between the tooth and the root in the mummy’s mouth should be physically corroborated and then confirmed with DNA showing that tooth and mummy came from the same person.
More recently, a chapter in the Oxford Handbook of the Valley of the Kings observed that controversy and criticism have haunted the modern identifications of royal mummies, including hotepsut, and that much of the data has yet to be released in clear peer-reviewed form.
Then there is the question of how the theory began.
In his 2019 retrospective, Donald Ryan suggested that without Elizabeth Thomas, the woman on the floor might never have been connected to Hatchepsut at all.
Here is the scorecard with each piece of evidence labeled.
Supported by the team scans, a moler from a box bearing Hatepsut’s name fits a gap and a broken root in this woman’s upper jaw.
Consistent with royalty, her left arm is bent across her chest.
Consistent with what is known of Hatchepsut, a woman of about 50 with signs of serious illness.
Still unverified DNA results that have never appeared in a peer-reviewed journal and a dental match that critics say still needs physical confirmation.
Weigh those for yourself.
Is the case closed or only half solved.
The answer may depend on one more question that has never been fully settled.
Whether the king who succeeded her truly wanted her gone.
The old story holds that Tutmosa III hated his stepmother and erased her the moment she was gone.
The evidence tells a slower story.
Egyptologist Peter Dorman of the University of Chicago has written that it was clearly Thutmosa III who initiated the program to deface and recarve Hutepsut’s monuments.
Yet the timing is strange.
Within a suite of chambers Hat Shepsuit had built at Cararnack.
Thutomos later created a hall recording his military campaigns from his 22nd to his 42nd year as king.
Dorman notes that this hall of annals was built and decorated no earlier than year 42, at least 20 years after Hatchepsut’s death, and he places the revision of her memory in that late period.
Revenge rarely waits two decades.
Researchers increasingly read the eraser as political calculation, a move shaped by questions of legitimacy and succession rather than personal rage, though the precise motive is still debated.
In June 2025, a study in the journal Antiquity, added another twist.
Jun Yi Wong, an Egyptologist at the University of Toronto, went back to the archival records of the thousands of statue fragments excavated at Dear Elbahari by the Metropolitan Museum of Art in the 1920s.
He found that many of Hot Shepsut’s statues had been broken at the neck, the waist, and the knees.
Weak points targeted in a ritual Egyptologists call deactivation, meant to neutralize the power believed to live inside royal images and applied to other kings as well.
Deposits of deactivated statues, Wong noted, have been found at multiple sites in Egypt and Sudan.
Once neutralized, the broken pieces could be treated as raw building material, and one ancient house appears to have been built almost entirely from fragments of hotepsuit statues.
Many of the faces, Wong noted, survive virtually intact.
Wong does not let Thmosas III off the hook, telling Live Science that Hutchuit undoubtedly suffered a campaign of persecution.
And in January 2025, Hawasa’s mission at Deer Albahari announced more than a thousand decorated blocks from her demolished valley temple, many still bright with color and carved with her names.
The king who removed her from the record could not keep her out of it.
On April 3rd, 2021, the world watched a procession through the streets of Cairo.
22 royal mummies, 18 kings, and four queens left the old Egyptian Museum on Tahir Square for the new National Museum of Egyptian civilization.
Each road on its own float inside a nitrogen-filled case, its name written in English, Arabic, and hieroglyphs, moving in the order of their reigns to a 21 gun salute.
Among them was Hot Shepsut.
Among them too was Thutmosa III.
The woman who had lain unnamed on the floor of her nurse’s tomb, now traveled through the capital in the same royal procession as the king accused of erasing her, bound for a hall designed to evoke the Valley of the Kings, where both had once been buried.
About 2 weeks later, on April 18th, the royal mummies went on public display.
A single tooth brought her there.
Whether that tooth has told the whole truth is a verdict still waiting to be written.
