A study of skeletons rediscovered in a Cairo museum says princesses used the weapons in their tombs. Other specialists want better proof.

A scrap of old newspaper, once used to wrap the bones of an Egyptian princess, still bears her name in black handwriting. It marks the remains of Princess Ita, one of six royals whose skeletons, lost for years, resurfaced in the Egyptian Museum’s basement during a 2020 curation project.

Those bones now sit at the center of a long-running argument. When Jacques de Morgan dug at Dahshur in the 1890s, he found royal women buried with bows, arrows, maces and, in Ita’s case, a lavishly inlaid dagger. Egyptologists have generally read such objects as symbols, tied to the god Osiris or to protection in the afterlife. A study in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology argues otherwise.

“Members of the royal family, especially the women, were active participants in skilled, physically demanding activities such as archery and hunting,” lead author Zeinab Hashesh of Beni-Suef University said in a press release. The weapons, she said, “were not just symbolic gifts but tools they actively used.”

It is a striking claim and a contested one. Several outside bioarchaeologists say bones alone cannot reveal what these people did with their arms.

The six are King Hor, who ruled early in the 13th Dynasty; Princesses Ita, Khenmet, Itaweret and Noub-Hotep; and an unlabeled woman provisionally identified as Princess Sathathormeryt. The study describes Ita, Khenmet, Itaweret and Sathathormeryt as daughters of Amenemhat II, buried around his pyramid. Hor and Noub-Hotep lay in adjacent shafts at the Amenemhat III complex. Only those two were examined in 1895, so the others went unstudied for more than a century. Between 22 and 58 percent of each skeleton survives, and every skull except Hor’s has been lost.

With the soft tissue gone, the team turned to entheses, the sites where muscles, tendons and ligaments anchor to bone. “We found pronounced development in the upper limbs of these individuals, which correlates to repetitive, high-intensity actions like pulling a bowstring or stabilizing a weapon,” Hashesh said. Ita had “strong upper-body muscle attachments, suggesting she habitually used weapons like maces or daggers,” while Itaweret’s skeleton, she said, “shows she was a skilled archer.”

The authors’ showcase is Noub-Hotep, whose tomb held arrows and whose second right metacarpal, a bone in the palm, is bowed with no sign of disease. Hashesh told Archaeology magazine that this is “a biomechanical response to the intense, repetitive pressure required to stabilize a heavy bow.”

The skeletons also record hard knocks. Itaweret survived broken ribs and stress fractures in her foot. Hor had a healed fracture at the base of his thumb and two small healed scars on his forehead. “What is remarkable is that the injuries healed well, which suggests they had access to advanced medical care for their time,” Hashesh said. The paper links that care to the Edwin Smith Papyrus, a trauma manual covering splints and wound treatment. The surviving copy dates to about 1600 BCE, after these burials, though one estimate puts the original two to three centuries earlier. Still, a healed bone proves survival, not necessarily treatment.

Royal rank bought no immunity. Hor’s eye sockets and brow show signs of early-life stress such as poor nutrition or infection, and Khenmet’s thinning bones may indicate osteoporosis, though the authors say that needs confirmation. They call this a “paradox of privilege.” It echoes the “osteological paradox” set out by James Wood and colleagues in 1992: A lesion can signal resilience as much as ill health, because a person must survive a stress long enough for bone to register it.

Critics focus on the study’s central inference. The bones show that “certain muscles appear to have been repeatedly used, but the actual cause of that use is uncertain,” Sonia Zakrzewski of the University of Southampton told Live Science. She also noted that the identities rest on 19th-century labels. Scott Haddow of the University of Turin pointed out that some changes appear on both sides of the body. “Archery is a highly asymmetrical activity,” he said. Age, body size and genetics shape attachment sites too. Sébastien Villotte of France’s National Center for Scientific Research called for comparisons with non-elite Egyptians of the same period.

That comparison is how archery has been tested in bone before. In a 2014 study the Dahshur authors cite, Aline Thomas compared 36 Neolithic men from France, 13 of them buried with arrowheads, and found upper-limb differences between the groups. Dahshur has no such baseline yet. The paper’s own details show the difficulty: It ties Noub-Hotep’s bowed metacarpal to archery but says similar bowing in Khenmet is commonly associated with metabolic problems such as vitamin D deficiency. A 2012 review the authors also cite called reconstructing activity bioarchaeology’s “holy grail.”

Burial context cuts both ways as well. The paper itself notes that bows were common funerary equipment through the Middle Kingdom. Senebtisi, buried at Lisht near the end of the 12th Dynasty, held only the common title “lady of the house,” yet was adorned with weapons and royal insignia. A similar dispute followed the 2017 genomic finding that a celebrated Viking warrior grave at Birka, Sweden, held a woman. DNA settled her sex, while critics kept questioning whether the weapons reflected her role.

The team plans further chemical, DNA and stable isotope work, which could test their reading of kinship from shared spinal anomalies. They also found frankincense and juniper residues on the bones, ingredients they tie to long-distance trade with Punt and Nubia.

“Our dream would be to go far beyond simply identifying the Dahshur royals,” Hashesh said. “We would try to tell their full life stories, their families, health, and even their political roles, with as much detail as possible.”

Whatever those tests show, the study has already shifted attention. Grave goods drew the admiration for more than a century while their owners lay in boxes. “Their objects and jewelry are truly fascinating, breathtaking in their craftsmanship,” Hashesh said. “Yet, while archaeologists have long focused on preserving these treasures, the people themselves were often forgotten. Our study seeks to change that.”

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Endnotes

1. Hashesh, Z., Gabr, A., and Walker, R. (2026). Bioarchaeological reassessment of Dahshur royal skeletal remains from the Late Middle Kingdom (c. 1850–1700 BCE). Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology 5:1844402. https://doi.org/10.3389/fearc.2026.1844402
2. Frontiers. (2026, July 17). Ancient Egyptian princesses born 4,000 years ago were skilled archers, new study shows. EurekAlert! https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/1135301
3. Hughes-Castleberry, K. (2026, July 17). Did ancient Egyptian princesses use weapons? Controversial study claims they hunted or trained with the military, but not all experts agree. Live Science. https://www.livescience.com/archaeology/ancient-egyptians/did-ancient-egyptian-princesses-use-weapons-controversial-study-claims-they-hunted-or-trained-with-the-military-but-not-all-experts-agree
4. Weiss, D. (2026). Egyptian Warrior Women. Archaeology, November/December 2026. https://archaeology.org/issues/november-december-2026/digs-discoveries/egyptian-warrior-women/
5. Kotarba-Morley, A. M., and Westaway, M. (2026, August 1). Warrior princesses of ancient Egypt? The Conversation, republished in Cyprus Mail. https://cyprus-mail.com/2026/08/01/warrior-princesses-of-ancient-egypt
6. Thomas, A. (2014). Bioarchaeology of the middle Neolithic: Evidence for archery among early European farmers. American Journal of Physical Anthropology 154(2), 279–290. https://doi.org/10.1002/ajpa.22504
7. Jurmain, R., Cardoso, F. A., Henderson, C., and Villotte, S. (2012). Bioarchaeology’s holy grail: The reconstruction of activity. In A. L. Grauer (ed.), A Companion to Paleopathology. Malden: Blackwell, 531–552. https://doi.org/10.1002/9781444345940.ch29
8. Wood, J. W., Milner, G. R., Harpending, H. C., and Weiss, K. M. (1992). The osteological paradox: Problems of inferring prehistoric health from skeletal samples. Current Anthropology 33(4), 343–370. https://doi.org/10.1086/204084
9. Nunn, J. F. (2002). Ancient Egyptian Medicine. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press.
10. Papyrus Edwin Smith. Science in Ancient Egypt, Saxon Academy of Sciences and Humanities in Leipzig. https://sae.saw-leipzig.de/en/documents/papyrus-edwin-smith
11. Grajetzki, W. (2014). Tomb Treasures of the Late Middle Kingdom: The Archaeology of Female Burials. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812209198
12. Mace, A. C., and Winlock, H. E. (1916). The Tomb of Senebtisi at Lisht. New York: Gilliss Press.
13. Senebtisi. Wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Senebtisi
14. Researchers reaffirm remains in Viking warrior tomb belonged to a woman. Smithsonian Magazine. https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/researchers-reaffirm-famed-ancient-viking-warrior-was-biologically-female-180971541/
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