"So, by default, it has to be Nefertiti, unless you imagine it's one of her daughters, which some Egyptologists do," says Fletcher. But she adds: "It's easy for people to take potshots at me. I've really put my head over the parapet for this one."
The 37-year-old Egyptologist has studied numerous mummies from a range of ancient cultures in the last 15 years. She holds a Ph.D. from Manchester University. While working on a ponderous thesis about hair, Fletcher took note of a wig that had been described in the literature by Victor Loret, discoverer of tomb KV35 in 1898. In one of the tomb's side chambers, he reported finding a hairpiece along with a shaven-headed mummy whose profile strongly resembled that of the famous bust of Nefertiti in the Berlin Museum. In the course of her research, Fletcher saw in the Egyptian Museum at Cairo an unlabeled hairpiece that, upon further investigation in 1994, she found out came from tomb KV35.
The short fragmentary wig seemed most likely to have been set in the Nubian style, as worn by the royal women of Amarna, a desert city to which the seat of power had been transferred from Thebes by Akhenaten, the so-called "Heretic King" who ruled for 17 years, from 1352 to 1336 B.C.
He saw it as his volatile mission to convert Egypt from its traditional polytheism to the worship of just one deity — Aten, the sun disc god. His wife, the charismatic Nefertiti, apparently was a tremendous force in establishing the idealistic new religion and catalyzing the violent rift that developed between the royal family and the traditional-minded priests.
The fragmentary wig was the beginning of a long, circuitous journey for Fletcher — one that ultimately led her deep under the desert, to the walled-up chamber in KV35, and the potential discovery of a lifetime.
"It's an amazing series of events that played out," Fletcher says, clearly moved by the memory of touching the fragile, dusty skin of three "mystery" mummies lying naked in a claustrophobic chamber. One of them she identifies as most likely Nefertiti; the other woman does indeed seem to be Akhenaten's mother, Queen Tiye, as first stated by an American-Egyptian team in the 1970s. The boy so closely resembles Tiye that he is likely to be her son, Prince Tuthmosis.
