Hey....I'm the guy who rediscovered the tomb (KV 60) from which the declared mummy of Hatshepsut was retrieved. Here's my 2 cents:

First, a little history...the tomb was first encountered by Howard Carter in 1903. Carter was looking for big decorated tombs at the time and found an undecorated crudely-carved tomb with tomb mummies inside: one in a coffin with the name and title of a royal nurse, and the other on the floor nearby. He found the whole scene boring and covered it up. Three years later, a fellow named Edward Ayrton was excavating the neighboring tomb (KV 19) whose entranceway had been carved over the earlier KV 60. He removed the coffin with the nurse mummy and shipped it to Cairo. We know this only indirectly from a note in the Egyptian Museum registers. The tomb was covered up and essentially lost until I rediscovered it on my first day of work in the Valley of the Kings in 1989, tooling around with a broom. Inside, we found the remaining mummy, on the floor, mummified to a high standard, and striking what many believe to be a royal female pose (left arm diagonal across the chest with the left hand clenched, right arm straight across the body). In her 1966 masterpiece, "The Royal Necropoleis of Thebes", Egyptologist Elizabeth Thomas suggested that should KV 60 ever be rediscoverd, then perhaps the mummy of Hatshepsut would be therein. Her cautious hypothesis was based on the notion that the mummy of Hatshepsut had never been identified in the other royal caches, and that KV 60 is located a very short distance from her official royal tomb (KV 20), and therefore it could have served as a cache for her mummy when her tomb, like most of the rest, was robbed or dismantled. The nearby tomb of her nurse would have served as a suitable and convenient place to stash her. This is a very nice and tidy story, and although we were convinced that the mummy we found in KV 60 is a royal female, there was nothing in the tomb to indicate a specific identity.

Enter Zahi Hawass, who found the whole mystery of KV 60 intriguing. He examined the mummy in the nurse's coffin in the museum in Cairo and was impressed by its quality. (Curiously, the mummy of the so-called nurse didn't fit the coffin.) Working with the Discovery Channel (who put up a lot of money to provide the sophisticated equipment), both mummies from KV 60 were radiologically examined. Zahi had the insight to also examine a canopic box recovered from the Deir el-Bahri royal mummy cache in 1881. It bears Hatshepsut's name and assumably some of her internal organs. Surprisingly, the box also contained a tooth in the mix that apparently exactly matches a missing tooth from the mummy we found on the floor of KV 60. It's like Cinderella's slipper....and I think it's a novel approach to a long mystery. Why would a tooth be in a canopic Jar or box? The Egyptian embalmers would not throw out such a thing. It probably was knocked loose from her rotten gums during the mummification process. In other royal tombs, including KV 21 which I also excavated, there are caches of embalming materials that were stored in jars so that not even fluids from the mummification process would be thrown away.

Although its all too easy to cynical, especially in the "Hall of Maat", I think we should welcome a creative approach to an interesting problem, and I, for one, think its fairly convincing, and look forward to other novel approaches that my substantiate the present claims.

Donald P. Ryan
Division of Humanities,
Pacific Lutheran University
Web-site: www.plu.edu/~ryandp