These Egyptian Princesses Buried with Weapons May Have Actually Used Them

In the 1890s, French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan excavated the surroundings of the pyramids of Amenemhat II and Amenemhat III at Dahshur. He unearthed the remains of several members of the 12th Dynasty royal family: King Hor and five women, including Princesses Ita, Khenmet, Itaweret and Noub-Hotep, presumed daughters of Amenemhat II, along with a fifth unidentified individual. Beside these women lay weapons: bows, arrows, daggers. At the time, archaeologists concluded without hesitation that these were purely symbolic objects, intended to protect the deceased or accompany her into the afterlife. That interpretation has now been seriously challenged by a study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology.¹

Remains Forgotten for 130 Years in Cairo's Storage

After their discovery, the bones and funerary objects were transferred to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, where the storerooms swallowed them for over a century. It was in 2020, during a major curation project accompanying the transfer of collections to the Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza, that an international team rediscovered them, intact and poorly catalogued. A remarkable opportunity: for the first time, modern science could be applied to these royal remains.

Bones as Archives of Movement

The method used rests on the analysis of entheses, the anchor points where muscles, tendons and ligaments attach to bone. When certain muscle actions are repeated intensely over years, they leave lasting marks on bone tissue: more pronounced ridges, remodelled surfaces. By combining X-ray imaging and Fourier-transform infrared spectroscopy (FTIR), the researchers sought to identify signatures of repeated physical activity on the six royal skeletons.

The most striking case is Princess Ita. Deceased between ages 28 and 34, she displayed particularly developed muscle attachments at the right shoulder, arm and hand. Marks that, according to the study's authors, suggest habitual weapon use, possibly the dagger that lay beside her and is now on display at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo. Princess Khenmet, older, showed very robust ligament attachments of her own, also suggesting demanding physical practice.²

A Fascinating but Contested Hypothesis

The authors are cautious in their interpretation. A marked enthesis alone does not prove weapon use: other intense physical activities, from pottery to agricultural work, can produce comparable traces. And the study conditions are far from ideal. Only 22 to 58 percent of each skeleton survived the millennia. Most skulls are missing. Soft tissue, which would have provided the richest information on actual muscles, has long since decomposed.

Specialists quoted by several media outlets have underlined these limits: the gap between indicator and proof remains considerable. Attributing these bone ridges to martial training rather than other royal activities is, for some, closer to an appealing hypothesis than rigorous proof. The scientific community remains divided.

Reimagining Women at the Pharaonic Court

Beyond the debate over evidence, what the study offers is an invitation to interrogate our representations of ancient Egypt. The image of a royal family strictly separated by gender, in which women knew only prayer, jewellery and ceremony, may be as much a modern projection as a historical reality. Middle Kingdom Egyptian texts mention court women engaged in hunting. Reliefs depict queens alongside pharaohs in conquest scenes. And earlier discoveries have shown that women of the PredynasticPredynasticThe period of Egypt before unification (c. 3100 BCE) and the First Dynasty, marked by the Naqada cultures and the gradual emergence of the state.→ period were buried with weapons.³

The princesses of Amenemhat II continue to speak through their bones. Whether or not they were trained archers, their study compels us to nuance an overly linear narrative about female roles in ancient Egypt, and reminds us that history's most precious archives are sometimes written into the very matter of bodies.