First Royal Mummy Found Since Tut is Identified

brian0918 writes "In what is being described as the most important find in the Valley of the Kings since the discovery of King Tut, a single tooth has clinched the identification of an ancient mummy as that of Queen Hatshepsut, who ruled Egypt about 3,500 years ago. A molar inscribed with the queen's name, discovered in a wooden box in 1881 in a cache of royal mummies, was found to fit perfectly in the jaw of 'a fat woman in her 50s who had rotten teeth and died of bone cancer.' Reuters also reports on the DNA analysis: 'Preliminary results show similarities between its DNA and that of Ahmose Nefertari, the wife of the founder of the 18th dynasty and a probable ancestor of Hatsephsut's.'"

Comments

The Irony

[Anonymous Coward]

Anyone else find it ironic that these rulers enslaved entire races of people for generations to build gigantic pyramids so that they would never be forgotten only to have grave robbers steal everything and Western archaeologists show up thousands of years later asking, "Who the fuck were you?"

Re:The Irony

[sayfawa]

The fools. They should have had their slaves build something like this.

Re:The Irony

[CyberLord Seven]

I'm not so certain KMT used so many slaves as we once thought. New evidence is coming to light that suggests that the builders of the pyramids were paid employees rather than slaves.

In addition, the Bibles recording of the Jews as leaving KMT with Moses (A KMT name) is odd because the people of the Nile were meticulous record keepers. If so many people had departed as suggested in the Bible, then many critical tasks would have gone undone or would have been performed poorly due to low staffing or unskilled workers performing the tasks in the place of the slaves.

There are no records to indicate any such crisis to the KMT economy.

Anyway, they did achieve a sort of immortality. You do know the names of many of these people despite the fact that you don't know which body belongs to which name.

Re:The Irony

[IDontAgreeWithYou]

Even more ironically I agree with you.

Re:The Irony

[Patoski]

Ancient Egyptians were meticulous record keepers, but notorious revisionists. In their written records the ancient Egyptians sought to hide their military defeats.

Undoubtably the pharaoh would seek to blot out anything connected to what would have been one of Egypt's more embarrassing military defeats.

Re:The Irony

[rleibman]

I heard the same thing from the 48 lecture course on Egyptology from "The Teaching Company", they never wrote a loosing battle, we sometimes infer that they lost because in the context of a war they keep on wining battles closer to home.

Re:Inscription

[EveryNickIsTaken]

This was the original "Grill." That's right.. Kickin' it *really* old school, egypt-style.

Bad Teeth

[StefanJ]

I recently finished listening to a lecture series on the history of ancient Egypt. Fascinating stuff. As I recall, Queen Hatshepsut was kind of erased from history by a later pharaoh. Lady leaders just didn't fit in with the Way Things Were Supposed to Be.

Lots of ancient Egyptians had bad teeth. Flour tended to have lots of sand in it thanks to the grinding process, and chewing wore away tooth enamel very efficiently.

Stefan

Medical procedures

[ushering05401]

I am interested in what medical techniques they might uncover by examining the evidence. It is reported that this lady not only had bone cancer, but probably liver cancer and diabetes.

What lengths did the Egyptians, so often given credit for advanced medicine for their era, go to to save a ruler considered divine?

Regards.

Re:Medical procedures

[Dunbal]

It is reported that this lady not only had bone cancer, but probably liver cancer and diabetes.

      I'm not a forensic anthropologist, but as a physician I can say there are a lot of signs to tell you that a patient has cancer even if you only recover a fragment. Especially osteosarcoma (bone cancer), which tends to produce lytic lesions (areas where the bone is less dense) in most of the bones of the body. A quick x-ray of the jaw could reveal this. Plus osteosarcoma will alter calcium and PTH levels and dramatically change bone formation and reabsorbtion. See, bone is LIVING tissue. It's constantly being absorbed and recreated.

      Now I don't know where they get liver cancer from - it's very unlikely that a patient will have TWO separate types of cancer. But the liver lesions are probably just metastases of the primary osteosaarcoma.

      The egyptians were rather advanced in the field of medicine - FOR THEIR DAY. There is no possible way they could approach the level of medicine we had say 200 years ago, much less today. Diabetes is a complex disease that is eventually lethal when left untreated. I doubt very much they had discovered that feeding patients pig pancreases could mitigate this disease somewhat, since this was discovered early last century. We won't talk about sulfonyl-ureas and other oral hypoglycemiants.

      They were pretty good at basic surgery, they had a pretty good idea of which tumors NOT to touch (because they got worse if you touched them), and it's rumored that some were even capable of drilling burr holes in patients' skulls to treat subdural hematomas (from trauma/battle injuries) or encephalitis/meningitis (to relieve the pressure inside the skull from a swollen brain/membranes). However we MUST bear in mind that we have NO record of what their actual success rate was with these procedures. It's easy to attribute supernatural powers to a vanished culture, however reality is they had no antibiotics, precious little by way of anesthetics, and more importantly no scientific method.

Re:Medical procedures

[Dunbal]

Not to split hairs, but the honey is actually working as an anti-septic.

      We do use sugar and/or honey from time to time to treat large, difficult ulcers in our hospitals here. The idea is that the sugar is something that stimulates growth in the wound while at the same time the huge osmotic pressure prevents bacterial growth. Honey is high in fructose, but it will work with plain old sugar, too.

      An antibiotic is a drug that targets specific types bacteria by inhibiting growth or cell wall synthesis, etc. Honey, on the other hand will kill ALL cells, bacteria or otherwise. Fortunately for us, however, our circulation helps minimize the osmotic gradient and the only cells that die are the ones on the fringe of the wound - which are probably injured anyway.

      Another thing we use - funnily enough - is epamin - an anti-covulsant medication that somehow is very similar to certain tissue growth factors and does help heal wounds faster.

      So, to make my point - yes ok, the egyptians probably used honey, wine, and even vinegar as antiseptics. However this is not as effective as say cepahlexin :)

Re:Inscription

[TubeSteak]

FTFA:

During the embalming process, it was common to set aside spare body parts and preserve them in such a box.

I other words: After she was dead, they put her tooth in a box.

It's lucky they did, because as TFA also explains, her tomb was looted and the mummy removed, though not in the article is the fact that her son removed her cartouche and representation from all the monuments and temples he could find.

I have a 98% similarity in DNA...

[Short Circuit]

Can I get my inheritance, now?

Re:Inscription

[Rob T Firefly]

So in another 3500 years, archeologists will dig up Flava Flav and assume he was a wise and great leader? *shudder*

Re:King Tut?

[TechnicolourSquirrel]

Why do Americans call the boy king "King Tut"? His full name was Tutankhamun (or Tutankhamen)! Is this name so hard to spell or pronounce? Tut makes him sound like some fifth rate Batman villain! Grrrrrr! I'm afraid I must object to your use of this one-syllable colloquialism, 'Grrrrrr!' Would it have been so difficult to type 'This makes me very angry,' in proper English?