Muscle Marks on 4,000-Year-Old Bones Settle a Century-Old Question: Egypt’s Princesses Really Used Their Weapons

The dagger buried with Egyptian Princess Ita is a lovely thing, its hilt patterned in blue and gold, its guard rounded like something meant to be held rather than admired. For more than a century, that was the puzzle. Weapons kept turning up in the tombs of royal women, bows and arrows and maces, objects the culture coded as male. Were they props for the afterlife, or had these women actually swung and drawn them in life?

The bones, it turns out, remember. A reassessment of six royal skeletons from Dahshur, the pyramid field south of Cairo, finds muscle-attachment marks that only build up through years of hard, repeated use, and they line up almost exactly with the weapons the women were buried holding.

The Bodies in the Basement

These are not new discoveries so much as rediscovered ones. Jacques de Morgan pulled the burials from the sand at Dahshur in the 1890s, and the remains eventually reached the Egyptian Museum, where they sat in two wooden boxes in the basement and were more or less forgotten for a hundred years. Some bones still carry their nineteenth-century labels, names inked straight onto tibiae or scrawled on scraps of the old newspaper used to wrap them. In 2020 a curation project led by Zeinab Hashesh, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Beni-Suef, tracked them down again.

What survived was not much to look at. The soft tissue had long since crumbled to powder, and every skull but King Hor’s had gone missing somewhere in the early 1900s.

Even so, the remaining bones gave up a surprising amount. Four of the women were sisters, daughters of the pharaoh Amenemhat II. Ita lay beside Khenmet; Itaweret beside an anonymous woman the team thinks is probably Princess Sathathormeryt. Two more royals, Princess Noub-Hotep and King Hor, came from a neighbouring complex.

“Members of the royal family, especially the women, were active participants in skilled, physically demanding activities such as archery and hunting,” says Hashesh. The evidence is written into how the bones grew.

Reading a Bowstring in Bone

Muscles that get worked hard leave their mark where they anchor, thickening the bone at the attachment point, and archery leaves a fairly distinctive signature: pronounced development through the upper limbs, the forearm, the gripping muscles of the hand. Princess Itaweret, dead somewhere between 20 and 34, carried it clearly, alongside well-healed fractures of two ribs and three bones in her foot. Princess Ita’s bones point instead to habitual close work with something like a dagger or a mace, which sits neatly with the blade in her coffin. And Noub-Hotep offers perhaps the cleanest case of all: a subtly bowed bone in her right hand, heavier muscle marks on the right side (the tell of a right-handed draw), and a quiver of arrows laid in beside her. “We found pronounced development in the upper limbs of these individuals, which correlates to repetitive, high-intensity actions like pulling a bowstring or stabilizing a weapon, proving these activities were habitual throughout their lives,” says Hashesh.

The grave goods, Hashesh argues, were not just ceremonial gifts but kit these women had used.

There are limits worth keeping in view. This is a single team working on a partial, century-battered collection, without the skulls, and the muscle-marking method reads habitual strain rather than naming the exact activity that caused it. The planned DNA and isotope work that might firm things up is still waiting on ministry approval.

Privilege Was No Shield

Still, what the skeletons show is a version of royal life with a good deal more grit in it than the gold leaf suggests. Itaweret’s broken ribs may have come from a fall or a heavy blow. King Hor had a healed fracture in his hand and old scars above his eyebrows; several of the group carried signs of childhood nutritional stress. Being a princess, in other words, did not spare you the accidents of a physical life, though it did buy you something: the injuries knitted back together cleanly, with no sign of the crooked healing or infection that killed so many. “What is remarkable is that the injuries healed well, which suggests they had access to advanced medical care for their time,” says Hashesh. The clean mends echo the fracture-setting and wound care described in the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, rare bodily proof that the knowledge was really put to work.

For a long stretch, Hashesh points out, the treasure got the attention and the people inside the tombs slipped out of focus. “While archaeologists have long focused on preserving these treasures, the people themselves were often forgotten. Our study seeks to change that,” she says.

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