For more than a century, the royal women buried at Dahshur were known mainly for their jewelry. Gold diadems scattered with turquoise flowers, falcon-headed necklaces, a dagger with a handle of lapis lazuli and gold. Museum visitors came to admire the treasure, and the women themselves faded into the background as little more than well-dressed mannequins of the Middle Kingdom.
A new analysis of their bones has changed that picture completely. These princesses were not simply buried with weapons. According to researchers who re-examined their skeletons, they knew exactly how to use them. In other words, they were warriors.
The findings were published in July 2026 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, and you can read the full open-access study here: Bioarchaeological Reassessment of Dahshur Royal Skeletal Remains from the Late Middle Kingdom.
The story begins in the 1890s, at the height of the Egyptomania craze. French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan, then head of Egypt's Antiquities Service, was digging at Dahshur, the pyramid necropolis about ten kilometers south of Saqqara. In April 1894 his team lifted a set of stone slabs and found something almost unheard of: two undisturbed royal burials, belonging to Princess Ita and Princess Khenmet.
The treasure made headlines around the world. The bodies did not. In 1915 the human remains were moved to the Egyptian Museum in Tahrir Square, where curators of the day placed them all into a single wooden box, gave the box one catalog number, labeled it "human remains," and put it away. There it sat, essentially forgotten, for more than a hundred years.
In 2020, during a curation and inventory project at the museum, archaeologist Zeinab Hashesh of Beni-Suef University opened that box and realized what she was looking at. Inside were six royal individuals whose remains had been considered lost: King Hor, Princess Noub-Hotep, Princess Ita, Princess Khenmet, Princess Itaweret, and a sixth woman provisionally identified as Princess Sathathormeryt.
Some of the identifications were still legible in ink on the bones themselves, written by the nineteenth century excavators. One skull carried the words "Roi Hor" in black beside the opening at its base. Another bone bore a hand-lettered name. Some fragments were still wrapped in old newspaper with names scrawled across it, a strange kind of paper trail linking the Victorian dig directly to the modern laboratory.
Weapons in the graves of Egyptian royal women had been known for a long time, and for just as long they had been explained away. Bows, arrows, maces, a ceremonial dagger: many Egyptologists treated these as symbolic gifts, ritual objects meant to protect or empower the deceased in the afterlife rather than gear the woman had ever picked up in life. The reasoning was largely circular. Weapons belonged to men, so a weapon in a woman's tomb must mean something other than what it appeared to mean.
Bones do not care about that assumption. Muscles pull on bone throughout a person's life, and where a muscle or ligament attaches, the bone responds by thickening and roughening. Habitual, high-intensity, repetitive movement leaves a signature. Archery leaves a particularly recognizable one, because drawing a heavy bow loads the shoulder, upper arm, hand and collarbone in a very specific way, over and over, for years.
The soft tissue of all six mummies had crumbled to powder, and the skulls of the women were separated from their bodies in 1906 and have never been found. What remained, though, was in good enough condition to estimate age at death, height, sex, illness, and injury. And the muscle markings were unmistakable.
Princess Ita was a young woman, between roughly 28 and 34 years old, with powerful upper-body muscle attachments. The pattern in her arms, her left little finger and her right collarbone is consistent with habitually gripping and swinging something heavy, such as a mace or a dagger. Fittingly, hers is the tomb that held the famous dagger with the lapis and gold handle.
Princess Khenmet was older, in her late thirties or forties, and her bones had begun to thin with age. Even so, her ligament attachments were remarkably robust, the mark of a body that had been worked hard for a long time.
Princess Itaweret was between about 20 and 34. She had survived broken ribs and fractures in her feet, injuries that had healed well. Her skeleton points to a highly skilled archer.
Princess Noub-Hotep offered the clearest evidence of all. Her forearm bones show pronounced muscle attachments, and one of the bones in her hand is visibly bowed, precisely the kind of change produced by repeatedly steadying and drawing a bowstring. Arrows were among her grave goods. King Hor, buried near her, showed the same archer's signature.
Taken together, the research team concluded that these were not symbolic possessions. The weapons in the tombs matched the bodies in the tombs.
Four of the six were sisters, daughters of the pharaoh Amenemhat II of the 12th Dynasty, who ruled Egypt in the nineteenth century BC. They were buried in matching underground chambers beside their father's pyramid, Ita next to Khenmet, Itaweret next to the woman thought to be Sathathormeryt.
The sisters also shared something less flattering than their gold. All of them carried the same cluster of rare congenital abnormalities in the spine. Conditions like these tend to appear when parents are closely related, and in the Egyptian royal family close-kin marriage was standard practice for generations. The sisters' vertebrae quietly confirm what the genealogies suggest.
King Hor, the sixth individual, belongs to a later chapter. He ruled briefly in the 13th Dynasty, perhaps only a couple of years, and was buried in a shaft tomb within the pyramid complex of Amenemhat III. He is best known today for the life-size wooden statue of his ka, his spirit double, found in its shrine in 1894 with rock-crystal eyes and a pair of upraised arms carved above its head. It remains one of the great masterpieces of Egyptian art.
One of the quieter findings has nothing to do with weapons. Several of these royals showed signs of persistent infection and of nutritional deficiency. Living at the very top of one of the wealthiest societies on earth did not protect them from chronic illness or from going without what their bodies needed.
What it did buy them was care. Itaweret's broken ribs, most likely the result of a heavy blow or a fall from a height, healed cleanly. So did the fractures in her feet. Injuries of that kind, mending that well, suggest skilled treatment and a long period of rest and attention. Whatever these women were doing to break bones, someone competent was there to set them afterward.
The researchers are careful about the limits of the work. Losing the skulls means losing a great deal of information about age, ancestry, diet and dental health. Chemical analyses that could clarify what these women actually ate, and whether they grew up where they were buried, have not yet been carried out.
The larger ambition is to give the Dahshur royals their biographies back: their families, their health, their possible political roles, and eventually a respectful exhibition in which the people are displayed alongside the jewelry and weapons rather than being upstaged by them. As the lead researcher put it, archaeologists have spent generations preserving the treasures while the people themselves were forgotten.
There is something satisfying about that reversal. For a century and a quarter, Ita's dagger was the star of the room and Ita was a name on a label. Now the bones have spoken, and the woman turns out to be the more interesting object.
