Ancient Egyptian art is filled with images of reverent revelers with pointy cones on their heads. Men and women are shown with head cones in artistic depictions on everything from papyrus scrolls to coffins, donning the pointed objects as they take part in royal feasts and divine rituals. Women who wear the cones are sometimes also portrayed in childbirth, an activity associated with certain gods.

But while the head cones were relatively common in Egyptian art for more than a thousand years, their purpose and existence has remained a mystery. No archaeologist had ever excavated one of the enigmatic objects, leading some scholars to think of Egyptian head cones as merely symbolic representations—the equivalent of the halos that appear on