Breasts Key Clue to Hatshepsut's Obesity

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July 13, 2007 —When mummy experts piece together what an ancient person looked like in real life, one key to body type that's a dead giveaway is the size of the mummy's breasts.

Paleopathologists who have been trying to reconstruct the appearance of Hatshepsut — whose mummy is the subject of a Discovery Channel documentary on Sunday, July 15 — say they know that Egypt's greatest female pharaoh was obese in part because her breasts were so very large, even after 3,000 years.

"Huge and pendulous," Hatshepsut's upper girth immediately caught the attention of mummy experts, according to Zahi Hawass, Egypt's secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities.

Egyptologist and paleopathologist Bob Brier, one of the world's foremost experts on mummies, told Discovery News: "Breasts are one clear indication of obesity in female mummies. It is fairly simple: fat is deposited there, the skin stretches and that skin does not retract with mummification. So it is easy to see excess skin in the area of the breasts."

The daughter of Pharaoh Tuthmosis I and wife of Tuthmosis II, her half-brother, Hatshepsut reigned from 1498 to 1483 B.C. as the fifth pharaoh of the 18th Dynasty. Later members of the dynasty included Akhenaton and Tutankhamun.

When her husband-brother died, Hatshepsut became regent for the boy-king Tuthmosis III, the child of Tuthmosis II and a concubine. But hieroglyphic carvings suggest she donned a royal headdress and false beard, and proclaimed herself pharaoh.

A preliminary examination of the mummy has shown that statues portraying Hatshepsut might have been very generous depicting the powerful woman who challenged ancient Egypt's tradition of male supremacy.

Indeed, breasts seem to be the only feature that represented Hatshepsut's body faithfully. But granite statues from her mortuary temple at Deir el-Bahri, such as "Hatshepsut as Female King," portray a topless Hatshepsut with an almost adolescent body.

And Egyptian scribes often described Hatshepsut, the "Foremost of Noble Ladies," as the most beautiful woman in the land.

Reality might have been rather different, at least during the last years of her life. Bald in front but with long hair in back, the mummy of Hatshepsut shows an obese woman just over 5 feet tall, with rotten teeth and perhaps a skin disease.

And That's Not All...
Moreover, Ashraf Selim, the radiologist at Cairo University who examined the mummy, told Discovery News that she did "have exaggerated abdominal folds," another unmistakable sign of obesity.

"The presence of exaggerated folds in the anterior abdominal wall is the only marker of which I am aware for the recognition of obesity in a mummy," Arthur Aufderheide, professor of pathology at the University of Minnesota and author of "The Scientific Study of Mummies," told Discovery News.

"After death, there is a stage at which the fat of the abdominal wall has largely decayed, but its overlying skin is still largely intact. If the decay process is arrested by mummification at this point, the redundant skin, no longer supported by the underlying fat, arranges itself into multiple, prominent folds," Aufderheide said.

According to Frank Ruhli, paleopathologist at the Institute of Anatomy at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, assessing precise weight in a mummy is a very difficult task.

"Breasts itself would not be the best assessment for an individual weight. Abdominal circumference is correlated with weight, as to a certain extent is also upper arm circumference. Yet all these measures are dependent on subcutaneous fat presence and this gets completely distorted by mummification," Ruhli told Discovery News.

But Brier has no doubt. "Hatshepsut was a fatty," he said.

The Discovery Channel and Zahi Hawass, Egypt's secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, will unveil details of how Hatshepsut's mummy was found in the documentary "Secrets of Egypt's Lost Queen" on Sunday, July 15 at 9 p.m. ET/PT.