What happened to the missing mummies of Egypt's lost queens?

Joann Fletcher ventures through the temples of Egypt to uncover the 'lost queens' of ancient times

By Joann Fletcher7:00AM BST 04 Sep 2014

On 2nd February 1925, the photographer from the Harvard-Boston archaeological expedition was setting up his camera tripod on the rocky plateau of Giza close to the base of the Great Pyramid. Having some degree of difficulty in his attempt to get the legs on an equal footing, he dislodged what he assumed was a small piece of limestone, but which closer inspection revealed to be a fragment of plaster, the kind of plaster traditionally used in ancient times to seal up the entrance of a tomb.

With the same archaeological team having already made a series of spectacular discoveries at Giza over the previous 20 years, most notably a large group of superb statues of King Menkaure, builder of Giza’s third pyramid, this new discovery was so unexpected the excavation’s director George Reisner was still in the US. So the task of opening the tomb fell to his British assistant Alan Rowe and his Egyptian head foreman Said Ahmed Said, whose removal of the plaster covering revealed a 100 foot vertical shaft cut down into the limestone bedrock, filled solid with limestone masonry and yet more plaster. Only after a month when this had all been removed was it then possible for the archaeologists to descend to the very bottom of the shaft to reach the doorway, marked with the official seal of King Khufu, builder of the Great Pyramid.

Although the rock-cut rectangular chamber which lay beyond was only 15 by 8 feet, the archaeologists could see ‘the dazzle of gold’ through a small gap at the top of the doorway. They could also see the chamber was crammed full with all manner of wonderful things whose inscriptions, initially read with the aid of binoculars and later at close quarters, revealed the contents had belonged to Khufu’s mother, Queen Hetepheres (c.2600 BC). With her status as queen mother making her ‘first lady’, at that time of greater importance than the king’s wife, she was certainly the most important woman to her son Khufu since the first tomb he built at Giza was for her, located “in the most important point in his own royal cemetery” noted Reisner’s colleague Noel Wheeler.

Life, love and death in land of the pharaohs

Published on Tuesday 5 March 2013 09:14

Yorkshire historian Joann Fletcher uncovers the lives of ordinary people in Ancient Egypt in a new TV documentary. She talks to Chris Bond.

We know all about the Greeks and Romans from our school days, but when it comes to the Ancient Egyptians our knowledge tends to be a little more hazy.

Yes, we can conjure up images of Cleopatra, King Tutankhamun and the pyramids, but beyond this the land of the pharaohs has remained a mystery to most people.

It’s something that Barnsley-born historian and Egyptologist Dr Joann Fletcher hopes to change with her new two-part documentary Ancient Egypt: Life & Death In The Valley Of The Kings, which goes out on BBC Two next week. The Valley of the Kings is the burial place of some of Egypt’s most famous pharaohs, but it isn’t the lives of these kings, rather the ordinary people they ruled, that she’s interested in here.

Dr Fletcher, an honorary research fellow at York University, sheds light on the real lives of two ordinary Egyptians, a husband and wife from the tomb-builder’s town of Deir el-Medina who lived to serve their royal masters. By walking in their footsteps she provides an insight into what life was like 3,500 years ago, reimagining how people lived and the colours, sounds and smells they experienced.

She focuses on the lives of chief architect Kha and his wife, Meryt, who lived around 1400 BC. “It’s a bit of a departure for me because normally I’m studying the high and mighty, but with this I’m looking at ordinary people and specifically one married couple,” she explains.