Nefertiti: The Mysterious Fate Of Egypt's Lost Queen | Nefertiti: Where Is Her Mummy? | Odyssey

this channel is part of the history hit Network [Music] [Music] she is a truly enigmatic figure from the ancient world some view her as a Trailblazer others as a traitor to her religion a woman who is increasingly identified by Scholars as a pharaoh in her own right married to religious zealot and stepmother to Egypt's most famous pharaoh it's the iconic nether the material and textual evidence relating to her life has been the subject of study for more than 150 years and yet the truth surrounding Nefertiti remains one of ancient Egypt's great Mysteries [Music] unlike many rulers of the New Kingdom such as seti the first and Ramses II was expertly mummified remains allow us to learn about their lives and their deaths Nefertiti's mummy has eluded egyptologists many theories exist regarding her ultimate fate while numerous conspiracy theories swirl online what which should we believe and which are even plausible now filmmaker and egyptologist Curtis Ryan Woodside has teamed up with many of the leading experts in his search for Netflix in order to determine whether hamami has already been fired or whether her body has even survived the past three and a half Millennia we want to encourage the real Queen Nefertiti to stand up I made 21 beads actually a strong Contender for Nefertiti there have been lots of attempts to try and deny that LE fatigue could be the mother of the Moon well if we have a mummy what can we actually learn from it and it's likely that the mummies of thousands of Royal Figures were lost to history where is Nefertiti it is a question on the lips of many egyptologists discover the past with exclusive history documentaries from history hit and uncover the secrets of some of the most famous people and events in history delve into the history of the Ancients with history hits exclusive offering of documentaries explore with us the enchanting Temple of Karnak or take a deep dive into the fascinating pre-history of Scotland we also aim to bring you the stories and legends that shaped our world through our award-winning podcast Network sign up now for a free trial and odyssey fans get 50 off their first three months just be sure to use the code Odyssey at checkout [Music] has the mummy of Nefertiti already been fired the lead Contender for this identification has for many years but a mummy found an 18th Dynasty tomb in the Valley of the Kings known to archaeologists as kv-35 this mysterious mummy was not the tomb's original owner rather she was most likely placed there some years after her original burial in order to protect her from looting this mummy was found in the side chamber of the Tomb alongside an older woman and a young man [Music] the older lady has been identified through DNA testing of a lock of hair from Tutankhamun's tomb [Music] she is Queen T the grandmother of Tutankhamun and the mother of Nefertiti's husband akhana we found that the mummy known as elder lady this mummy people said she could be Queen tea because there is a hair found in the tube of King Tut in a box they took the sample of this hair and they analyzed that with the hair of this lady and they sit there matching but also this one will never confirm that this could be Queen tea and tea were able to find out that she is the daughter this elder lady she's the daughter of yuya and tuya and the wife of the Third the identification of Queen T amongst this cache of three mummies has led many scholars to suspect that the other two mummies were members of a close family in Consequence the mummy of the younger lady has been thought to be with elusive Nefertiti was the re burial of Nefertiti with family members would make sense DNA samples taken from the younger lady would appear to prove otherwise Professor Aiden Dodson of Bristol university has studied the younger lady in some detail whilst writing his book Nefertiti Queen and Pharaoh published in 2020 [Music] he has his own thoughts on who this woman may be one of the key questions of course about Nefertiti is what happened to her mummy and this is very much tied in with the question about the identity of a mummy found in 1898 in the Tomb of Ammon hotep II known generally as the younger woman or the younger lady however when the a number of mummies were DNA tested and the results published in 2010 and all this rather changed the results as published um said that the younger lady was not only the mother of the dark hamoon but was his mother by a brother sister marriage now this presents a number of problems because neither of the known wives of McNaughton um Nefertiti and Kia are royal sisters and if they were that would certainly be included in there in their titulary and also that there is no sister of akinaten recorded as his wife at the time when you'd expect to find um being born and there are also other sources at Amana where if there were a third Queen you would actually expect to find some kind of mention thank you the same DNA signature in tatankhamun which would appear to come from a brother system marriage from his parents is also to be found if you have three generations of first cousin marriages involved but amongst the um suggestions um has been that Nefertiti was the daughter of I and that I was a son of yuya and therefore a brother of Queen tea [Music] also going back a couple of generations there are other suggestions which would fit again again with first cousin marriages the only thing to make this work genealogically for the younger lady to be Nefertiti and also the mother of is for her mother to have been a sister of Ammon hotep III now there is no trace of a wife of I with that background so on that basis one can produce a credible um Family Tree which would make the younger woman first cousin result of series of first cousin marriages of Akinator and most likely I think Nefertiti there have been lots of attempts to try and deny that Nefertiti could be the um that's only on the basis that she's only going to show with daughters but that ignores the history of Egypt up until that point where kings and queens only ever show with daughters sons are never shown as part of a family group so to almost art to ask for moon to appear in these procession of daughters you find on so many of akananda's monuments is really to ask for something which shouldn't actually exist up until that point in Egyptian issues only under the Rama side that you find mass representations of Royal sons and daughters [Music] so on that basis I think a reasonable case can be made for the younger lady being Nefertiti and simultaneous mother the age of the body has been estimated at between 25 and 35. aging of ancient bodies of that kind of age is notoriously problematic but between 25 and 35 actually works quite nicely for Nefertiti because she presumably will have married akenarten when she was in early to mid teens say 15 and then she has a career of the 17 years of her husband's Reign Plus at least three years following on from that as female King at Neff and afro art one thing the identification of this mummy with Nefertiti does however is says something about the way her life ended because the body has very very serious facial wounds thought to be caused by tomb robbers who hacked through rap who wrappings to get at the um the valuables but when the body was cat scanned a few years ago the analysis showed that there are fragments in the sinuses which wouldn't have been there if the body had been a dried husk when it was damaged that could only have got there if the body had been alive at the moment the wound was um infected that wound is so severe that it certainly would have caused massive hemorrhaging and probably deaths through blood loss or shock very very rapidly all of which would suggest that if say if this is correct identification of it and even if it isn't nepete it's still the mother of tadafa moon that she died a horrible death whether by accident design or disguised design as an accident so therefore this body is a fascinating one and throws up all sorts of interesting questions let's say I think one can make a good case for it to be Nefertiti although there is absolutely no sort of Smoking Gun and one can't say QED at this point in time [Music] with Scholars divided over the identity of the younger lady where does this leave the search for Nefertiti there have been other candidates over the years yet the majority have been eliminated as dating from wrong Dynasty or indeed due to the mummification processes employed not even a hailing from senior nobility this leaves just one remaining candidate from among the two otherwise unidentified female mummies gathered in an unfinished and undecorated tomb in the Valley of the Kings I have my own thoughts on who the mummy of Nefertiti could be the two female mummies in kv-21 have not actually received much attention however in recent years egyptologists have started to take a closer look at these two mystery women Sophia Aziz an egyptologist and mummy expert has been investigating KB 21 with some interesting results the kv-21 mummies sadly have been through a really rough ordeal it's remarkable that they've survived at all the tomb itself was first discovered in 1817 by an extraordinary character of egyptology his name was Giovanni Belzoni an Italian man a great stature strength and intelligence he was known as an adventurer an Explorer and to some the father of modern egyptology he had an interest in Hydraulics and even thought about becoming a monk but he somehow ended up in Egypt discovering temples and tombs while getting involved in fist fights dodging bullies and competing with Rivals and when balcony discovered the tomb he was in reasonably good condition as were the two mummies within the tomb he even describes their hair as long and well preserved this however all changed when the term was rediscovered in 1989. but this time he was evident that the tomb had been flooded for a considerable length of time so both mummies would have been submerged in this water additionally some graffiti was discovered indicating that visitors had been in and out of the Tomb in fact even the mummy's hair was now missing probably taken as a souvenir now it's quite incredible that the two mummies were still within the tomb and this could be because the tomb was undecorated it was uninscribed and there weren't any clues really to the identities of these two mummies so this could be the reason why they were just left there which is actually quite sad the way they were sort of discovered discarded forgotten about and then rediscovered now known as mummy 21A and 21b CT analysis was conducted and the City results are interesting so by now mummy 21A had actually lost her head and her body her was infuses she had postmodern fractures with some body parts missing she was the younger of the two mummy 21b was determined to be in her 40s although she did have a head intact right eye was missing her nose was missing but it was determined to have been small and narrow it also looked like her brain had not been extracted through the usual nasal root and her heart was no longer in her body but she did have resin soaked pads within her body cavity she also displayed signs of osteoarthritis which would be indicative of a woman in her 40s so you know it was difficult to really identify the mummies with the state of preservation we're looking at the age difference between them money 21A being in her 20s the other one being in her 40s it's quite possible they were mother and daughter and this would this would reflect the fact that they were interred together as well and what's also interesting is that they had bent elbows and clenched fists which would indicate that they were both raw mummies foreign 2007 and 2009 molecular analysis was conducted of a number of mummies from the New Kingdom Period this was to see if they were related now amongst these mummies was the famous Tutankhamun the two fetuses discovered in his tomb and mummy's 21A and 21b the technique used by the team was genetic fingerprinting which looks as short tandem repeats these are repeated sequences found within the non-curting region of DNA so these repeats vary between individuals so by comparing the repeats across a number of microsatellites is possible to work out whether or not people are related genetic fingerprinting is used in paternity maternity tests genetic disorder testing identifying unknown human remains and in crime scenes so if you've ever watched a crime scene investigation series you'll know that at the crimes in forensic evidence is gathered if DNA is successfully extracted they're free to find a match the problem with ancient DNA is that it tends to be heavily degraded and this is due to processes such as cortolysis after death when the body's own enzymes started self-destruct and also the burial environment can also have an impact chemical physical process Sears can further degrade the DNA and of course microbial type so all of these factors can really have an impact on the DNA when the study was conducted and the results released this really left the academic field divided with those that thought it was possible to extract ancient DNA and those argued that is virtually impossible so the reason for this was that at that time extracting ancient DNA was still relatively new and there'd been some studies in which it was claimed they had successfully extracted DNA only to find out it was due to Modern contamination yeah do you put it around here yeah so we can now do some pictures of her head the team however said that they took um precautions so they extracted the ancient DNA from deep within the bones thereby trying to rule out contamination also they are genotyped or the team that were involved in the study to rule our contamination he was argued that he would have been more suitable to extract mitochondrial DNA this is because mitochondrial DNA which is passed from the mother is just better preserved the nuclear DNA however the team did eventually publish the mitochondrial results as well but if we look at the data so mummy's 21A and 21p we know that is most likely the DNA would have been heavily degraded if we think about the environment that they were in being submerged in water they were handled a lot visitors were in and out of the Tomb so we did expect the data not really reveal a lot and this was actually the case the team were unable to retrieve sufficient data so this does actually reflect the fact that the DNA would have been damaged the only way to reconcile the differences is probably to do next Generation sequencing which is a more sensitive High throughput technique which is much more suitable for heavily degraded DNA now if we look at the context of the burial itself if we look at the location of the Tomb and we look at the fact that both these ladies were entered together they both had these clenched fists and bent elbows quite likely that they were mother and daughter and they would have been royal we look her mummy 21b she's in her 40s she has that degenerative condition and if we look at Nefertiti's portrayal in latter life she is depicted as an older lady so I need 21 beaks actually a strong Contender for Nefertiti for me the mummy kv-21b is the strongest candidate for Nefertiti if the DNA is anything to go by it could be her even the mummy KB 21 a has been found to be the daughter of KB 21b now this could be huge as we do not actually have a DNA source for Nefertiti The Headless kv-21a has been linked by DNA results to the two stillborn children found in the Tomb of tutank Amu that could only mean one thing that the Headless mummy KB 21A is in fact the sister and wife and the mother of the two children of tutank amul this mummy kv-21a that I believe is Tut's sister Anki sinamun even shares some similarities with the body of tat including some of the genetic bodily deformations if she is that makes KV 21b her mother and we know that the mother of ankier ceramun was none other than Nefertiti therefore 21b could in fact be Nefertiti the reason that we don't have a DNA profile for Nefertiti is because we're not actually sure who her parents are she has been linked to be the daughter of pharaoh I now you see tuya and yuya had three children they were Queen tea the Royal astronomer Anan and I in our Mana I has been referred to as the God's father this would indicate that he is the father of a daughter that has married the Pharaoh which would be Nefertiti so this title links I to be the father of Nefertiti quite nicely in my opinion it is entirely possible that kv-21b is Nefertiti if you just look at the face of the mummy and you look at the representations that we have of Nefertiti the similarities are striking now I am not in any way a forensic pathologist or an expert at facial reconstruction however I have my own way of doing an artistic representation an artistic reconstruction of a money when you look at KV 21b you first of all notice the long slender neck and of course the strong jawline however you also start to notice the eyes she has painted on eyeliner on the mummy in the thin style which we can only associate with the bust of Nefertiti because kv-21b's head has been damaged in later years by grave robbers one of her eyes is actually missing so what I did in my reconstruction process was I took the one eye on the one side duplicated that inverted it and lined it up to the skull that way I could have a symmetric face to work with then what I start to do I start to outline key features on the mummy and what I started to notice was this mummy shared a lot of the lines on the face that we would associate with Nefertiti such as the jowls by the mouth also the lines under the eyes are strikingly similar to The Nefertiti Berlin bust even the cheekbones and jawline lines up pretty well even the nose eye shape and the lips line up pretty well with presentations that we have of Nefertiti I am in no way claiming that kv-21b is 100 Nefertiti however for me she is the closest Contender have a look at the Reconstruction that I have done and make up your own mind [Music] [Music] please [Music] [Applause] [Music] foreign [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] this leaves us in a predicament because you see many egyptologists are skeptical on the DNA results of KB 21A and B some egyptologists are still searching for the real Nefertiti today we want to encourage the real Queen Nefertiti to stand up we have to remember this is not a photographic likeness of the queen there was no such thing as portraiture in the western sense in ancient Egypt the Torso in the Brooklyn Museum of and you can notice that the cartouches are all hacked out that's because the ancient Egyptians did everything they could to try to erase his memory because the ancient Egyptians purposefully tried to destroy the memory of the amount of period it is important for us egyptologists to try to enlist the service of other individuals to help us to try to reconstruct that period and one of the ways we can do this is by asking individuals that are involved in medicine and genealogical research to come to our assistance and collaborate with us science in the service of the humanities is a very very valuable tool and then trying to identify Nefertiti and other members of the ancient amarna family the two mummies that are suggested to be the physical remains of Queen Nefertiti the first KV 35 yl another set of human remains that are suggested to represent Nefertiti or KV 21b so now as a typical an ancient Egyptian studies we have a Clash of Titans two camps are the physical remains in kv-35 younger lady the remains of Nefertiti or r the physical remains of KV 21 be the physical remains of Nefertiti and we know that she was not a twin so one of these two identifications has to be dismissed and here in a nutshell how we unpackage the two theories so that you can make an educated conclusion about which of the identifications is the more compelling and again in 2019 the genetic markers of this mummy KV 35 younger woman were compared a very compelling evidence that she is in fact able to be connected with that royal family now as we look at KV 21b there were analysis that were conducted on this mummy in 2016 and 2021 but those genetic markers seem to be less numerous and there are many many more gaps in her genetic markers by the fact that the DNA evidence did not support the identification of kv-21b as Nefertiti the proponents of that theory decided they would take another attack and so they tried to press into service the use of a CAT scan and or historical data and what they tried to do was to show that there was coincidence between the mummy and the cranium as revealed by a CAT scan and so the Mythic just described is academically flawed so the two images that they chose represent an individual at two different stages in their life and so it's inconceivable that a mummy can represent the two ends of a person's life a younger and an older one so in my opinion the superimposition of The Mummy and the cranium as a result of a CAT scan on two different images that do not necessarily represent the same face is open to Serious academic scrutiny or will you base your conclusion on the preponderance of evidence that scientific genealogical data provides the answer is up to you hi Cara hi Curtis how are you I'm great and you good good hanging in there yeah yeah you know I you know I'm working on this new documentary and I I was discussing it with you beforehand and you know you had some pretty interesting views about and I just thought it would be great to have you share the your views in this documentary so we're looking to see who are the candidates for Nefertiti's mummy you know what is your opinion or do you think she should still be a mystery it's funny there's all of this um Heming and hawing and discussion about which mummy is hers and some have identified her based on hair um some have identified her based on DNA studies some have identified her based on location and I actually just steer clear of the argument almost entirely just standing on the sidelines with arms crossed and scowling from afar asking well if we have a mummy what can we actually learn from it sometimes you can learn a great deal sometimes not as much as you would like finding the mummy of Nefertiti you know what could it potentially teach us could it potentially sideline us into imposing certain theories or questions upon her and I think that just the money of of um just the mummy of hachepsut and how much that how much attention them finding the mummy of hot chefs that seems to have drawn from scholarship has in my opinion taken away from hotshepsut's history achievements and and many other uh issues that I think deserve more attention so in some ways I think the mummy Chase is like the shiny thing over here and I would rather be over here with my arms crossed scowling looking on outside you want to learn more about what she did and who she was rather than okay there's the the three thousand year old body I I don't I say this to my graduate students all the time I say it's my undergraduate students all the time we should only be asking research questions that we have a chance of answering and in the case of some mummies unless there is a toe tag unless there is a text assigned to this mummy we will never truly know whose mummy is Nefertiti's it's the same with Akhenaten if these mummies aren't marked in some way that's definitive there will always be some element of doubt and we will always be unsure about which mummy is whose and so given that this is a research question that we actually cannot answer in the same way that I have students that want to write about Akhenaten was he mad or strategic well that's great you can you can touch that question but you'll never be able to get to akhenaten's psychological State because Egyptians didn't leave anything about the psychological state in the same way if this mummy is not definitively marked we can't know and Nefertiti not being ostensibly a member of the 18th Dynasty Royal household at least directly related DNA studies are only going to be of so much use and this is a circular argument of tail chasing that I would rather opt out of if a woman's mummy is found whose DNA is linked to tudankamu and then why could it not be one of his sisters or or somebody else in the family whom we don't know or attempts to find her May impose identities on mummies that are not her it's not like the The Mummy of let's say seti the first or Ramses II where we had their names on the bandages on the inside yeah yeah this is this is basically all guesswork well the and the other thing floating about this research Curtis if I if I may be so bold is Nicholas Reeves suggestion that Tutankhamun was buried in the foyer of the king who served before him and the king who served before him was likely svencarving smencaray's funery materials have not been found in any way shape or form from the Valley of the Kings which is highly unusual and suggests that there is a tomb for smenkare that we maybe have not discovered yet right yeah and if you fit with I would say 30 to 40 percent of egyptologists who are open to the idea that Nefertiti because she shares the ankheprae name and no other king is taking on the throne name of another king that would be a strange and aberrant thing to do that on kemporary element does link never nephro otton whom we know is Nefertiti with smencare if nefertitious menka Ray then we can be talking about this mummy identification all the time but she may be hidden away someplace where we have not discovered her yet that that this that theory of Nick Reeves haunts this entire discussion and it is it is a typical Ploy of researchers to say but that tomb isn't here we don't have it my close examination of these scans highlighted the apparent presence of closed doorways on the West Wall potentially leading to an additional Tutankhamun period storeroom labeled X in the Cutaway bottom left here and that on the North to a corridor continuation of the Tomb labeled why The Proposal I put forward was that the burial of Tutankhamun was actually a tomb within a tomb [Music] foreign [Music] and the fact that we cannot find her is as much of interest to me in what the Egyptians chose to remember about female power in particular that's where I would rather spend my time I also see this certainty that's imposed generally swirling about documentaries uh for television research which I put research and scare quotes for that and and and an ego driven attempt to connect a find a discovery to a particular mummy or body and to create a an arena of attention that that draws the Gaze to Egypt and to that particular Discoverer so to be honest I I don't trust a lot of this discussion that's happening yeah that's why I wanted to have this this discussion with you because when I make documentaries I want to keep it open I want to have different opinions I want to have the facts [Music] as Cara mentioned Nicholas Reeves has his own theory that Nefertiti is still yet to be discovered in an Undiscovered chamber in tutank amun's Tomb now this is a very controversial issue amongst many however until we know 100 for sure that too remains a mystery foreign it is possible that her mummy has been found already and is lying in a museum basement uncataloged it could even be that she is in a private collection or worst of all she was maybe sold to a Victorian tourist and has since then been totally destroyed as was fashionable at the time [Music] of Fascination in the western world but what they used to be was kind of a commodity it's long been believed that mummified bodies had magical properties it was as if all the speculation regarding the mysticism and magic of the ancient pharaohs had literally become embodied in the remains of the Egyptians themselves so mummies were used for esoteric and occult ingredients love potions Health tinctures that kind of thing it was believed they had medicinal properties they were even ground up and used in popular paint that was known as mummy Brown to think of this today is pretty shocking I mean the victorians were consuming mummies literally in a cannibalistic way there's a level of dehumanization and disregard for human remains that Finds Its Pinnacle in the famous mummy unwrapping parties by the late 17th century the physical consumption of mummies was falling out of favor but the cultural consumption was only becoming more popular one of the first recorded public unwrappings of a mummy is from the early 18th century it was undertaken by an apothecary known as Christian Herzog and he later published his findings this was a new approach lent Credence under the banner of scientific discovery the spectacle began to overwhelm the research as the 19th century took hold famously it was an Englishman named Thomas Pettigrew later known as mummy Pettigrew who popularized The Mummy unwrapping party concept Pettigrew became interested in the subject after assisting famous explorer Giovanni Belzoni in an early unwrapping party held for Physicians the popularity of mummy unwrapping parties swelled in the 1830s early Victorian audiences found a mixture of spectacle death and scientific research to be an irresistible cocktail the last mummy unwrapping occurred in 1908 by Margaret Murray that's just over A Century of the public ruin of Egyptian bodies countless mummies were destroyed and lost to these centuries of Western consumption of Egyptian remains and it's likely that the mummies of thousands of Royal Figures were lost to history given that we've never been able to positively identify the mummy of Nefertiti it's entirely possible maybe even likely that her remains were discovered uncategorized and lost in this manner thank you I've been given permission to open the Tour by myself [Applause] foreign it could be that her mummy is still lying inside her tomb which is yet to be discovered if Pharaoh I really is her father it is possible that Nefertiti was buried in the Western Valley in Luxor near her father I and her father-in-law amen hotep III's tombs foreign [Music] and indeed mummy may still lie undiscovered beneath the Sands of Egypt it is equally possible that Nefertiti May remain like so many aspects of ancient Egyptian culture and history a tantalizing enigma for eternity

Channel: Odyssey - Ancient History Documentaries

Views: 108,344

Keywords: ancient history, classical history, ancient civilisations, classical antiquity, history documentary, classical documentary, nefertiti, nefertiti documentary, ancient egypt, tutankhamun, tutankhamun tomb, tutankhamun documentary, museums, egypt museum, mummy, valley of the kings

Id: zTd0jOe7g6Y

Length: 46min 37sec (2797 seconds)

Published: Wed May 24 2023