KING TUT REVEALED
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The most famous Egyptian pharoah of them all has finally been revealed:

King Tut's buck-toothed face was unveiled Sunday for the first time in public - more than 3,000 years after the youngest and most famous pharaoh to rule ancient Egypt was shrouded in linen and buried in his golden underground tomb.

Archeologists carefully lifted thae fragile mummy out of a quartz sarcophagus decorated with stone-carved protective goddesses, momentarily pulling aside a beige covering to reveal a leathery black body.

The linen was then replaced over Tut's narrow body so only his face and tiny feet were exposed, and the 19-year-old king, whose life and death has captivated people for nearly a century, was moved to a simple glass climate-controlled case to keep it from turning to dust.

In other mummy news, studies on the South American 'Llullaillaco Maiden' mummy has found that she and her sacrificial companion were prepared for their demise for up to a year:

New studies of the child mummies show that the children chosen for a one-way trek to a summit shrine, some time between 1470 and 1520, were groomed for death over a period of about one year.

The team, led by Dr Andrew Wilson at Bradford University, analysed hair samples taken from the heads and from small accompanying bags of four mummies....

The team studied DNA and isotopes (chemical signatures) from the hair samples, which give a unique snapshot of diet at different intervals: more than a year before death, the children ate vegetables such as potatoes, suggesting a peasant background. Subsequently it was enriched with plants such as maize, considered an "elite" food, and protein, likely to be dried llama meat.

A boy king and child sacrifices, remnants of long dead cultures preserved for our study centuries later. They also stand as reminders that regardless of our earthly status or burial finery we all end life in death.

EGYPT'S FEMALE PHAROAD FOUND?

Archaeologists are set to announce the positive identification of the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut:

A single tooth and some DNA clues appear to have solved the mystery of the lost mummy of Hatshepsut, one of the great queens of ancient Egypt, who reigned in the 15th century B.C.

Archaeologists who conducted the research, to be announced formally today in Cairo, said this was the first mummy of an Egyptian ruler to be found and “positively identified” since King Tutankhamen’s tomb was opened in 1922.

Zahi Hawass, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Cairo, said Monday in a telephone interview that the mummy was found in 1903 in an obscure, undecorated tomb in the Valley of the Kings, across the Nile from modern Luxor, and had been largely overlooked for more than a century.

Dr. Hawass said the identification of the well-preserved mummy as Hatshepsut (pronounced hat-SHEP-soot) was made a few weeks ago when a CT scan of a wooden box associated with the queen revealed a tooth. The tooth, he said, “fits exactly” into the jaw socket and broken root of the mummy of an obese woman originally found in Tomb 60 at the Valley of the Kings, the necropolis for royalty in the New Kingdom before and after Hatshepsut’s reign.

“We therefore have scientific proof that this is the mummy of Queen Hatshepsut,” Dr. Hawass concluded, citing primarily the tooth but also current DNA analysis suggesting a family relationship between the obese woman and Ahmose Nefertari, the matriarch of 18th dynasty royalty.

Other Egyptologists not involved in the project said that the finding was fascinating, but that they would reserve judgment until they had studied the results of the DNA analysis and had some of the evidence confirmed by other researchers.

“You have to be so careful in reaching conclusions from such data,” said Kathryn Bard, an Egyptologist at Boston University.

This is a fascinating discovery. The description of her as 'obese' certainly deviates from the Cleopatra-esque drawings I remember from my 6th grade text book illustrating 'Queen Hat' (as my teacher called her).

This should prove to be interesting as more information is released.