A misplaced tooth held the clue to the identity of one of the world’s most powerful queens, Hatshepsut, and it took the detective work of Egypt’s Indiana Jones, Zahi Hawass, to figure it out. Alone near midnight at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, Hawass—the secretary general for Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities—decided to scan a box with Hatshepsut’s name on it. To his surprise, a single molar in the box perfectly matched the space left by a missing tooth in the mouth of one of the museum’s unidentified mummies.
DNA analysis bore out Hawass’s suspicion that the mummy was indeed Hatshepsut, perhaps the greatest discovery since that of King Tutankhamen in 1922. While King Tut had his name all over his tomb, Hatshepsut had been removed from hers and put into an unmarked crypt, stowed safely away from raiders, says Angelique Corthals, a biomedical Egyptologist at the University of Manchester ...
