Bones show six Egyptian princesses actually drew the bows buried beside them

Six royal mummies excavated more than a century ago at Dahshur, a pyramid and tomb complex south of Cairo, had been catalogued for decades as ordinary, if unusually well-appointed, burials of ancient Egyptian noblewomen. A study published in July 2026 in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology reexamined their skeletons using modern bioarchaeological techniques and found something the original excavators had missed: the bows, arrows, and other weapons buried beside these women were not simply ceremonial grave goods. Their bones carry the physical marks of having actually drawn a bow.

Rediscovered Mummies From a Pyramid Complex

The six mummies were originally uncovered in the 1890s at Dahshur, a royal funerary complex of pyramids and shaft tombs a short distance from Saqqara. Four of the women were daughters of Pharaoh Amenemhat II, a ruler of Egypt’s Twelfth Dynasty during the early Middle Kingdom, a period the Metropolitan Museum of Art dates to roughly 1919 to 1885 BCE. Two of the sisters, Princess Ita and Princess Khenmet, were buried together in one underground chamber, while Princess Itaweret shared a second chamber with another woman researchers have tentatively identified as Princess Sathathormeryt. The remains drifted out of scholarly attention for decades before being reidentified inside the Egyptian Museum in Cairo during a curation project in 2020, which is what made the new skeletal analysis possible in the first place.

What the Forearm Bones Reveal

The clearest physical evidence involves the forearms. According to a release describing the study from the journal’s publisher, Princess Itaweret and a sixth royal woman in the group, Noub-Hotep, both show thickened forearm bones consistent with the repeated stress of drawing and stabilizing a bow over years of practice. Noub-Hotep’s right hand also preserved evidence of what the researchers describe as an “archer’s grip,” a specific pattern of bone development in the hand and wrist that forms from repeatedly pulling a bowstring rather than from other repetitive manual tasks. Researchers look for these markers, known as entheseal changes, at the points where tendons and ligaments attach to bone, since heavy, repeated use of a particular muscle group leaves a measurable signature there over time.

Buried With Weapons Usually Reserved for Men

Egyptologists had long known that several of the Dahshur women were interred with bows, arrows, and other finely made weapons more typically associated with male warrior burials of the period, but the standing assumption was that the objects signaled status or symbolic protection rather than actual use. The new analysis, reported by phys.org, argues the skeletal evidence changes that picture. Pronounced muscle-attachment sites across the women’s upper limbs point to repetitive, high-intensity activity consistent with archery and weapon handling, not merely ceremonial ownership of the objects found beside them in their tombs.

Beyond bows and arrows, some of the burial chambers also contained smaller weapons, including daggers and blades, along with hunting-related equipment not typically included in the burials of Egyptian women from the same era. The research team points to that broader assemblage, not just the bows alone, as reinforcing the argument that the objects reflected genuine use during life rather than a purely symbolic gesture at burial.

Healed Injuries and Signs of Skilled Care

Several of the six women also carried healed fractures and other injuries consistent with falls or blunt-force impacts, the kind of trauma that can result from hunting, riding, or vigorous physical training. Notably, the fractures had healed cleanly and in good alignment, which the research team interprets as evidence the women received competent medical attention at the time rather than being left to heal untreated. Taken together with the bone and muscle evidence, the injuries point to physically active lives that extended well beyond the purely ceremonial or domestic roles typically assigned to royal Egyptian women in surviving temple and tomb inscriptions.

Why the Timing of the Discovery Matters

The findings arrive roughly 130 years after the mummies were first excavated, a gap explained mostly by the fact that the remains were effectively lost to researchers after their initial cataloguing in the nineteenth century. Only the 2020 curation project at the Egyptian Museum reconnected these specific mummies with their original excavation records, allowing a research team to apply current bioarchaeological methods, including detailed analysis of bone density and entheseal markers, to remains that had sat unexamined for most of the twentieth century.

Rethinking Women’s Roles in the Middle Kingdom

The study adds to a small but growing body of evidence that elite women in Middle Kingdom Egypt were not confined to purely ceremonial or domestic roles. Egyptian art from later periods occasionally depicts royal women accompanying hunts, but rarely offers direct physical proof of participation. Rather than treating the bows and arrows in these tombs as symbolic offerings, the research team concludes that at least some royal women trained in archery and weapon handling much as their male relatives did, whether for hunting, ceremonial display, or a form of martial preparation whose exact purpose has not survived in the written record. The researchers note that further analysis of other royal and elite female burials from the period could help determine whether the Dahshur women were exceptional individuals or represent a broader, previously overlooked pattern among Middle Kingdom noblewomen.

This article was produced with the assistance of AI and reviewed by Morning Overview editors.

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