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In the end it was a tooth that clinched the Egypt's biggest find of the century.
Dr Zahi Hawass, head of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, this week announced to the world that he had positively identified a mummy found in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings as that of Queen Hatshepsut, the great ruler of ancient Egypt.
He described the discovery as "the most important find in Egypt's Valley of the Kings since the discovery of Tutankhamun in 1922".
Hatshepsut came to power in about 1479 BC after the death of her husband and half-brother Thutmose II. Her husband's son by a concubine, Thutmose III, was too young to rule, so Hatshepsut, the "foremost of noble ladies" (the meaning of her name), ruled as co-regent for about 22 years.
But she was far from a mere stand-in. She was a forceful and ambitious ruler, one of the great builders of ancient Egypt and the ruler who did more than anyone else to make her country the wealthy kingdom it had become by the reign of Tutankhamun, more than a century later.
When she died in middle age, she left a magnificent mortuary temple, Deir el-Bahri, near the entrance of the Valley of the Kings, composed of a stepped series of colonnades. But her mummy was missing from it.
But now Hawass claims to have built on the efforts of pioneering Egyptologist Howard Carter and found what he says is proof that a mummy found in a completely different place is that of Hatshepsut.
In 1903, in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings known as KV60, Carter found two sarcophagi, each of which contained the mummy of an unknown woman. One of the two was said to be Hatshepsut's wet nurse, the other was unidentified. Seventeen years later Carter went on to discover the tomb of Hatshepsut - but the two sarcophagi within it were empty.
Two months ago Hawass went back to the sarcophagi found in KV60 and brought them to Cairo's Egyptian Museum for further study. He used CT scans to produce detailed three-dimensional images of the mummified women and compared them with the known physical traits of the famous queen, as preserved in numerous contemporary paintings.
Hawass says that earlier accounts of the two female mummies confused their roles and identities. One of the two had her right arm clasped over her breast - leading the Egyptologist Elizabeth Thomas to suggest many years ago that this might be the missing queen, as this is a posture often adopted by Egyptian royalty.
But Hawass claims that the mummy found in this posture is in fact the queen's wet nurse. The crucial piece of evidence was a box containing a broken tooth, inscribed with the queen's name. Orthodontics professor Yehya Zakariya checked the tooth against all possible Hatshepsut mummies and found that it fit perfectly into a cavity in the upper jaw of the fatter of the two mummies from KV60.
Unveiled at a press conference at the museum, Hatshepsut was a fat woman who probably suffered from diabetes and liver cancer.
"The identification of the tooth with the jaw can show this is Hatshepsut," Hawass said. "A tooth is like a fingerprint. It is 100 per cent definitive. It is 1.80 cm [wide], and the dentist took the measurement and studied that part. He said he found it fit exactly 100 per cent with this part."
One Egyptologist, who declined to be named, said he was not totally convinced by Hawass's claim.
"It's an interesting piece of scientific deduction which might point to the truth," he said.
Hawass also said he was doing DNA studies on the mummy to make the identification more certain.
- INDEPENDENT
