"Nnnnnnn … efertiti."
Her habit of hesitation is hard to break. During a dozen years of hot and dusty research, mum was the word. Until now, the British Egyptologist has kept secret the presumed identity of an enigmatic and maliciously damaged mummy in a secret chamber in tomb KV35 in Egypt's Valley of the Kings. To everyone — colleagues, students and the public alike — she referred to her research subject simply as "X."
Having recently accumulated firsthand scientific data to add to the corroborative evidence that she painstakingly mounted over the years, Fletcher has broken her cryptic silence. She declares that the unwrapped, shaven-headed mummy in KV35 is indeed most likely to be Nefertiti, the stunningly beautiful and powerful 3,400-year-old royal who likely reigned as pharaoh after serving as queen, and whose death and final resting place were ages-old mysteries.
Still and all, whenever the question arises about who is in the tomb, Fletcher can't bring herself to say "Nefertiti" without that split-second hesitation.
Perhaps the only way to be absolutely, positively 100-percent certain of the mummy's identity, Fletcher agrees, is if she would sit up and declare herself as Nefertiti. Short of that happening, Fletcher's as sure as sure can be that the mummy is that of a late-18th-dynasty Egyptian woman with significant royal powers.
"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.
Egyptology is part art, part science. Earning and keeping one's professional reputation can be a squirrelly business, necessitating reliance on a careful balance of dry data and brilliant intuition. Despite having done 12 years of homework before assembling a team of renowned experts to go into the tomb with her — some wielding delicate brushes and others, the latest in digital X-ray technology — Fletcher has met with a healthy amount of naysaying."Somebody like myself," Fletcher concedes, "tends to attract as much negative attention as possible. I tend not to approach things in the most orthodox manner. Say the stereotypical thing and don't express too much emotion, or it might look like you're enjoying yourself, God forbid!"
Naysayers notwithstanding, clearly it's Fletcher's moment in the sun.
"It is all superlatives," she enthuses: "so amazing, so fantastic, so intense. I'm still dreaming about it. It was the high point of a career that has been an intense one. I'll never be able to replicate that again, even if I study mummies for the next 50 years."
The mummy formerly known as "the Younger Woman" (Nefertiti) lies in close proximity to her two tomb mates. All were stripped of most of their wrappings in ancient times and, therefore, the identities that likely would have been written on them. A shaved head is only one of the things that sets Nefertiti apart from "the Elder Woman" (Queen Tiye) with her luxuriant red tresses and exquisitely manicured nails, and also from "the Boy" with his characteristically flowing "side lock of youth."
Nefertiti's face is mutilated; her mouth savagely hacked away. Her right arm has been torn off just below the shoulder. The chest has a gaping hole in it. These are only the most visible of the atrocities. There are others, some of which are just now coming to light with the careful analyses of the bodies and recent digital X-rays of them.
"We're all absolutely knocked out by the detail we were allowed to study on the bodies," says Fletcher, who, with the rest of the team, scrutinized the skin for evidence of wounds or disease and looked at the brow for the impression of a band. "I was talking to the radiographer at King's College Hospital in London who's studying the X-ray images in depth. They've noticed something very peculiar about the way in which the feet of all three have been treated. It has so many ramifications."
It was long presumed that grave robbers had aimlessly hacked away at the bodies as they plundered for jewels. However, Fletcher saw firsthand evidence that the bodies were carefully and quite intentionally mutilated after having been unwrapped.
"We're trying to work out what weapons would have inflicted these wounds," she says. "Metal — bronze — was a precious commodity. Who would have had access to it? Someone systematically damaging the mummy with sharp blades that cut straight through to the bone."
Ancient Egyptians believed that postmortem damage could render a body incapable of living again in the afterlife, Fletcher explains, as the soul lived within the mummified body. By depriving a body of its mouth, for instance, the soul was robbed of the breath of life; by disfiguring the feet, a body might be unable to walk into the afterlife.
"It is that calculated damage that sends a chill through your spine," Fletcher says. "People were trying to condemn them to damnation."
At least one of the injuries (to Nefertiti) may have been done in life and resulted in severe blood loss, Fletcher says. Nothing is known about the manner and timing of Nefertiti's death. Now, clues are starting to mount that hers might not have been a natural death. The physical evidence makes sense given the historical context: About 14 years into Akhenaten's reign, Queen Nefertiti mysteriously disappears and a feminine-looking pharaoh shows up in the iconography of ancient Egypt. Like an increasing number of Egyptologists, Fletcher believes it's none other than Nefertiti wielding full pharaoh power. Perhaps the priests were so outraged by the controversial religion put forth by Nefertiti — their gods having been kicked out of the temples and replaced by the omnipotent sun god — that they not only killed her but also erased her identity in the afterlife.
"It's a melodramatic scenario," she says, "but quite possible."
Fletcher expects that she and her team still will be working on this project in 12 months' time: "There's no value at all in just whistling through the data. It's a time-consuming process, a work in progress. The information is coming out piece by piece."