June 27, 2007 —The mummy of Hatshepsut, Egypt's greatest female pharaoh, has been identified, thanks to gum disease and a missing molar.
The find, said to be the most important in Egypt's Valley of the Kings since the discovery of King Tutankhamun in the early 1920s, follows a one-year investigation led by Zahi Hawass, Egypt's secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.
Hawass' work will be detailed in "Secrets of Egypt's Lost Queen," a documentary that airs Sunday, July 15 at 9 p.m. ET/PT on The Discovery Channel.
One of the four major projects that Hawass has undertaken this year — as announced in a previous exclusive interview with Discovery News — the search for the mummy of Hatshepsut took a new dramatic turn with the discovery of a molar in a box.
Found in 1881 in a cache of royal mummies, the box intrigued the archaeologists because it bore the royal seal of Hatshepsut. A CT scan of the box revealed it contained a tooth — indeed, embalmers usually set aside body parts and preserved them in such containers.
The tooth matched within a fraction of a millimeter the space of the missing molar in the mouth of a 3,000-year-old mummy called KV60A. This shows that the mummy is Hatshepsut, according to Hawass.
"A tooth is like a fingerprint," he told reporters at a news conference on Wednesday.
The mummy, who had suffered severe gum disease, is an unidentified female found by Howard Carter in 1903 as he entered tomb KV60.
According to Carter, who later discovered the tomb of Tutankhamun, KV60 contained stuffed geese and the denuded bodies of two women.
One was in a lidless coffin inscribed for a wet nurse, later identified as Hatshepsut's beloved wet nurse Sitre In, now kept at Cairo's Egyptian museum. The other mummy, which might be that of Hatshepsut, belonged to an unknown female and lay uncoffined on the floor.
Interested in finding a royal burial, Carter paid little attention to the tomb and closed it up. The tomb location was subsequently lost.
