Found: Egypt’s lost queen

The quest began in the backrooms of the Cairo museum, home to hundreds of thousands of relics including dozens of so-far unidentified mummies, which are stored in cases pumped full of hydrogen to slow decomposition.

Dr Hawass had long suspected that one of these cases might contain the body of an exceptional pharaoh: Hatshepsut. Her name means “the first respectable lady” and she lived 36 centuries ago at the time of the New Kingdom, which saw the last great flowering of pharaonic power.

Although in Ancient Egypt royal blood was deemed to pass down the female line and the kingdom had several times been ruled by queens, according to Dr Hawass: “Hatshepsut was the only female to rule in a golden period; the others ruled in weak periods. She completely changed the programme.”

She was the only woman to rule as a full pharaoh, even wearing the pharaonic headdress and wooden beard. She was referred to by male and female pronouns in strict rotation but was regarded politically as an “honorary man”, not unlike Baroness Thatcher – and she had her own Falklands: it is thought that she led a military campaign in Nubia (Sudan); and she certainly led an expedition to Punt in what is now Somalia, a place regarded as a centre of great wealth by the Ancient Egyptians, although the trading trip yielded few profits.

Trade blossomed under the rule of Hatshepsut, and the gold that ornamented the tomb of Tutankhamun was acquired in her time. Yet there seems to have been an attempt to erase all memory of her.

Hatshepsut was born in about 1500BC, the beautiful daughter of Tuthmosis I by the most blue-blooded of his several wives. On the pharaoh’s death his son by another wife, Tuthmosis II, in turn became pharaoh.

Hatshepsut then married Tuthmosis II (there was no incest taboo for Egyptian royal families). When her husband died in about 1479BC, his son by a harem girl, Tuthmosis III, was in line to be pharaoh but he was a young boy – so Hatshepsut took the throne and held on to it until about 1458 BC, when she died and Tuthmosis III (long since grown into a man) belatedly claimed it.

By the time of her death the Ancient Egyptians had ceased building pyramids, which had proved a magnet for tomb-robbers. Instead, the rulers of the New Kingdom were buried in the Valley of the Kings at Luxor, 350 miles down the Nile.

Nowadays tourists being ferried through the Valley of the Kings in shaded tractor-drawn carriages don’t stop to visit Hatshepsut’s tomb, the first built in the valley, which has faded into obscurity and is known simply as KV20.

On the day I visited – in temperatures of more than 50C (122F) – I was led towards its mouth on a rocky hillside by one of Dr Hawass’s associates. Behind a locked iron gate a steeply sloping, scree-covered shaft leads down 300ft to the tomb itself. I was permitted to slither along it for a short distance before being recalled by my guide, who pointed out that not only snakes and scorpions but near-vertical drops lay ahead in the darkness.

Dr Hawass is shown descending to the tomb at the start of Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen, although in fact Hatshepsut’s mummy had been removed from it three centuries after her burial and hidden elsewhere to safeguard it from robbers. Dr Hawass suspected that it had been moved to a nearby tomb, nowadays referred to as KV60.

It was in KV60 that Howard Carter, who found Tutankhamun’s tomb, discovered two female mummies in 1920. He removed one of these to the Cairo museum; Dr Hawass recently arranged the removal of the second.

Was either of the mummies Hatshepsut? Both were candidates, as were another two in the museum. These other mummies had been discovered over the hill from the Valley of the Kings in a small tomb alongside Deir-el-Bahri, the vast funerary temple built by Hatshepsut that is exceptionally well preserved, and which gained brief notoriety in modern times when it was the scene of the 1997 massacre of 60 tourists by Islamic fundamentalists.

This small tomb is known as DB320. It is connected with Hatshepsut because it was found to contain, besides the two mummies, a small box bearing her name. Resting on four tiny legs, the box looks like an item of doll’s house furniture but is in fact believed to contain parts of Hatshepsut’s innards, stored separately after mummification. It has become sealed by embalming fluid, though, and it is not the practice to break open such relics.

The documentary discusses how Dr Hawass’s team used a series of high-tech processes to examine the candidate mummies. First a CT (computerised axial tomography) scanner was used to produce detailed images of the mummies in question and those of Hatshepsut’s known ancestors. These mummies then became the first to be subjected to a DNA search – but while the results of this were still being analysed, Dr Hawass had his “Eureka moment”.

He decided to subject the little box to a CT scan. Inside was a human liver and what appeared initially to be a fragment of bone. In fact it was a tooth – a molar with one root missing.

One of the two mummies from KV60 had a missing molar with one pendant root. The gap was exactly the same size as the tooth in the box, providing absolute proof that the mummy was that of Hatshepsut. The investigation also threw light on subsidiary mysteries, such as how she died.

Hatshepsut had kept Tuthmosis III from the throne. Did he hate her as a result? Did he have her killed? Such melodramatic speculations are quashed by the programme. Hatshepsut apparently died from an infected abscess on her gums.

As for why the queen’s image has so often been “rubbed out” on monuments, including the Temple of Karnak, it seems most likely that the defacing was done on the orders of Tuthmosis III, perhaps to assert his royal bloodline rather than from any personal resentment – an historical “correction” not wholly unlike those made many thousands of years later in the Soviet Union.

Other images defaced at about the same time are those of Senenmut, a commoner who became Hatshepsut’s chief adviser and architect (he designed Deir-el-Bahri). He may also have been her lover. Statues exist of him cuddling her only child – a daughter, Neferure – and the programme reveals a newly discovered inscription describing him as “the confidant of the king [ie, Hatshepsut] in all affection”.

The passage of 3,500 years can play havoc with one’s looks, and Hatshepsut’s mummified form discloses little sign of her youthful beauty. She had put on a lot of weight in later years. Yet to stare at that profoundly sleeping face is a fascinating experience.

Who knows what became of her anticipated communion with Osiris, god of the underworld? But here, for certain, is a woman predeceased by her husband and her daughter (Neferure died at the age of 16), whose glorious reign was systematically erased from history. Dr Hawass has, at least, rectified that last misfortune.

— Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen, Discovery Channel, July 17, 8pm