Ancient Egyptian Princesses May Have Been Trained Archers, Bones Suggest

For more than a century, the weapons buried beside ancient Egyptian princesses were dismissed as decoration, ceremonial props meant to escort royalty into the afterlife. Their bones now tell a different story. A new study of royal skeletons from one of Egypt’s grandest burial grounds finds wear patterns consistent with women who drew bows and gripped daggers during their lives, not only in death.

Researchers stop short of calling it proof. What they describe is an interpretation grounded in physical evidence: marks left on bone by repeated, forceful motion. Even so, the possibility reshapes a long-held assumption that royal women were passive figures whose grave goods carried only symbolic weight.

Six members of Egypt’s royal family anchor the research, published in the journal Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, all buried at Dahshur, a sprawling complex on a plateau overlooking the Nile southwest of Cairo. Among them were King Hor, four named princesses, Noub-Hotep, Ita, Khenmet, and Itaweret, and one unidentified woman. They lived and died during the Late Middle Kingdom, roughly 1850 to 1700 BCE. French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan pulled their remains from the ground in the 1890s, after which the bones sat largely untouched in a Cairo museum basement for over a hundred years.

Were Ancient Egyptian Royal Women Trained Archers?

Bodies keep a record of what they do. Repeat a demanding motion enough times and the skeleton adapts: muscle anchor points thicken, bones can bow slightly, and joints wear in telltale ways. Those changes are the skeletal version of a callus on a laborer’s palm.

In the Dahshur princesses, the marks cluster exactly where archery strains the body most. Princess Noub-Hotep shows heavy buildup where the muscles for gripping, finger flexion, and forearm rotation attach, all consistent with drawing a bowstring over and over. A bone in her right palm bows slightly with no sign of injury or disease, which the team reads as a response to sustained, high-force gripping. Arrows were found in her tomb. Itaweret carries robust attachment points at the collarbone and upper arm, where the chest and shoulder muscles anchor. Ita and Khenmet show comparable patterns.

King Hor was not exempt. His arm bones are lopsided in a way that points to repeated one-sided effort, and a dent in his right shoulder socket lines up with the demands of martial or skilled physical work.

Researchers examined each bone by hand, took X-rays, and ran a chemical analysis on the substances used to preserve the bodies. Their read on the arm and hand evidence is cautious but pointed: the bows and daggers in these tombs may have been tools these bodies were shaped by, rather than ornaments for the next world.

A Royal Family Written in Bone

Bones also record who these people were to one another. Several of them share rare spinal quirks, including a lower back vertebra partly fused to the base of the spine and an unusual angling of certain spinal joints. Traits like these tend to run in families. Their repeat appearance across the group points to close blood ties and possible endogamy, marriage within the royal line, a practice not unheard of in ancient dynasties intent on keeping power in the bloodline.

That family logic helped crack a mystery. One skeleton, catalogued only as Individual 408, arrived with no name and no records. By matching original excavation notes against the physical profile of the bones, the researchers concluded the remains most likely belong to Princess Sathathormeryt, whose tomb was documented as holding a flail, a bow, arrows, and scepters.

Privilege, it turns out, did not buy an easy life. King Hor, between 40 and 44 at death, carried healed scars on his forehead, a fully mended fracture in his right thumb, and faint pitting in his eye sockets that signals nutritional stress or illness in childhood. Itaweret had healed fractures in her left ribs and left foot, damage the authors say fits either a fall or a hard blow to the chest. Khenmet’s bones show reduced density throughout, a possible sign of osteoporosis, though the team notes more testing is needed to confirm it.

What stands out is how cleanly these injuries healed. Bone knit back together without lasting infection or crookedness, pointing to skilled care. As background, the authors cite the Edwin Smith Surgical Papyrus, an ancient Egyptian text on setting fractures, dressing wounds, and splinting, offered as context rather than a record of the exact treatment these royals received.

What Resin Reveals About Ancient Egyptian Trade

Chemical testing of the black residue still clinging to the bones added another layer. Using a method that identifies compounds by how they absorb infrared light, the team found that five of the six individuals had been treated with a blend of frankincense, a tree resin, and resin from a juniper species called Juniperus oxycedrus. Ita’s sample held juniper alone.

Neither material grew in Egypt in any real quantity. Frankincense arrived through long-distance trade with regions including the fabled Land of Punt, reached by state-backed expeditions, while the juniper likely came from Nubia and Sudan along the Upper Nile. Using the same recipe across the group signals an embalming process that was standardized and regulated, reserved for the elite and dependent on Egypt’s reach as a trading power. That mix also differs from what later periods used, when a different juniper from the eastern Mediterranean took over, marking a real shift in trade routes over the centuries.

Bones Don’t Lie

These six spent more than a century in wooden boxes, their names scrawled in old ink on their own bones, the skulls of the women long since separated and lost. Some conclusions about mummification therefore lean on records from 1906 rather than fresh examination, a limit the authors flag plainly. Yet what survived was enough to sharpen the identities of these royals and to reopen an old question. The bodies of these women, as the researchers read them, look less like ceremonial figures and more like people whose physical lives left hard evidence behind.

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