Were these ancient Egyptian royals actually warrior princesses?
They were buried with bows, daggers, and arrows. Now, there's new evidence that these princesses were trained to use them.
On Egypt’s Western Desert plateau, where the arid landscape meets the fertile Nile Valley, there lies a necropolis from the Middle and Old Kingdoms known as the Dahshur pyramid complex.
In 1894, a team led by French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan dug into shafts near one of the pyramids and found several underground burial chambers. Inside, they uncovered the 4,000-year-old remains of King Hor and Princess Noub-Hotep. The following year, they excavated near another pyramid and unearthed skeletons of four more royals from around the same time, including Princess Ita, Princess Khenmet, Princess Itaweret, and an unknown woman suspected to be Princess Sathathormeryt.
In addition to regalia such as scepters and jewelry, the princesses were buried with weapons, including maces, daggers, bows, and arrows. Egyptologists long interpreted these items as mere symbols of their status or equipment used in funeral rituals.
But now, a team of archaeologists has reexamined the royal remains and found evidence of previously unknown injuries and skeletal markers that they say suggest the weapons were more than mere objects for the afterlife: the princesses may have wielded them while alive.
“The feeling when we realized these women actually used their weapons was one of scientific excitement mixed with a sense of historical justice,” says Zeinab Hashesh, an archaeologist at Beni Suef University in Egypt. She added that historically, the presence of weapons in a burial was enough for archaeologists to identify skeletons as male.
Her team published their findings Friday in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.
Skeletons in the basement
In 1895, a French doctor in Cairo named Daniel Marie Fouquet performed a skeletal examination on two of the individuals. After his death, his wife, Madame Fouquet, brought the remains of all six royals to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in 1915.
Museum workers cataloged the findings and set them aside in the museum's basement. There, the skeletal remains lay undisturbed for more than a century until Hashesh and her colleagues came across the wooden boxes sitting on a shelf in 2020.
When her team uncovered the forgotten royals, they found that many of the bones were wrapped in newspapers from the early 1900s and still bore the original handwritten labels attached by the excavators. The royals were embalmed using more primitive techniques than later Egyptian mummies, so little but bone survived. The skulls of the five princesses were missing, reportedly separated from the bodies for further analysis in the 1890s and then lost.
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Still, Hashesh was excited to use modern bone analysis techniques to see what they could determine about the royals’ lives from what remained. In her view, ancient Egypt is known for its artifacts, but the human remains are often overlooked.
Finding the skeletons was a “profoundly moving experience,” Hashesh says.
“Realizing that these individuals, who were central to the royal court of the Middle Kingdom, had been silent and largely unstudied for over 130 years,” she says, “gave our team a sense of responsibility to finally tell their human story.”
Their inspection revealed that several of the royals had healed injuries, including rib, hand, foot, and back fractures. To the researchers, these findings reveal what they call a “paradox of privilege.”
The high status of the six royals did not protect them from life's harsh realities. However, King Hor and Princess Itaweret’s fractures healed well with no signs of infection or misalignment, suggesting that royals had access to physicians who knew how to reduce and monitor fractures.
Warrior princesses?
The skeletons also showed more subtle signs of their lived experiences. Repetitive muscle use can lead to visible changes, such as thickening, in the bones where the muscles attach. When the scientists inspected the royal bones, they concluded that not only King Hor, but also the princesses’ bodies bore the marks of a life spent training with weapons.
Princesses Khenmet and Itaweret showed bony buildup at two points on the forearm bones near the elbow, which the researchers argue is indicative of the high-stress repetitive movement of drawing an arrow with a bow. Princess Noub-Hotep showed a similar pattern, with thickened forearm and hand bones. When they compared these bone marks to known archery signatures from past studies of Neolithic archers, they found they matched.
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Princess Ita, who was buried with an elaborate dagger, had robust attachment sites along both forearm bones and at the base of her left pinky. These anatomical changes, the study's authors say, would have been stressed by using such a weapon.
"When we found that the muscle attachment sites and bone remodeling on their arms and hands corresponded perfectly to the mechanical loads required to draw a bow or grip a dagger,” Hashesh says, “the symbolic argument began to fade in favor of a much more resilient and active reality.”
Other scholars not involved in the work are less convinced.
Wolfram Grajetzki, an Egyptologist at University College London who wasn’t involved in the study, called the study “interesting,” but says he is a proponent of the argument that the weapons are ritual objects.
“It was not common in ancient Egypt to place objects related to professions into burials,” he says. He adds that there were other activities that might explain the bone changes the scientists describe, and that the authors should have also considered a wider range of options.
“Weapons were found in these tombs, so they see a connection,” Grajetzki says.
Sébastien Villotte, a bioarchaeologist at the French National Center for Scientific Research who studies how physical activity leaves marks on the skeleton, says that the arrows and daggers found in the graves make the princesses' involvement in such activities plausible, but he calls the interpretation "speculative."
He thinks the study could have benefited from comparing the bone markings with those of non-elite people from the same time and place.
To Heshesh, however, the marks left by muscles on bones and the harsh injuries may hint at the Egyptian elites’ active lifestyles: “These princesses were not leading sedentary lives of idle luxury.”
