Today she is in the royal Mummy Rooms at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, reunited at long last with her family of fellow pharaohs, with a sign saying she is Hatshepsut, the king herself (1473-1458 BC).
But in 1903, when the archaeologist Howard Carter found Hatshepsut’s sarcophagus in the Valley of the Kings, it was empty, Had her mummy been stolen or destroyed? The truth only came out a century later when Egyptian scientists positively identified a mummy called KV60a, discovered more than a century earlier in a minor tomb, as that of Hatshepsut. None of the treasures normally found with pharaoh’s mummies were with it. It was not even in a coffin.