Ancient Egyptian princesses were super ripped masters of weaponry trained to kill alongside male warriors

“Xena” wasn’t the only warrior princess.Analysis of royal remains in ancient Egypt revealed that princesses were potentially talented huntresses with bulging muscles who were well-versed in a variety of weaponry.“Members of the royal family, especially the women, were active participants in skilled, physically demanding activities such as archery and hunting,” the study’s lead author, Dr.Zeinab Hashesh, an archaeologist at Beni-Suef University in Egypt, said in a statement.

“This conclusion is supported by the way their bones developed to sustain heavy muscle use, which corresponds directly to the weapons discovered in their tombs.” As part of the study published in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, the researchers analyzed mummies belonging to six royal individuals who ruled during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom nearly 4,000 years ago.The royal mummies had originally been discovered at the ancient funerary complex of Dahshur in the 1890s, but became lost to history until 2020, when they resurfaced at the Egyptian Museum during a curation project in 2020. Four of the princesses found in the tombs were believed to be daughters of pharaoh Amenemhat II — Princess Khenmet, Princess Itaweret, Princess Ita, and a woman identified as Princess Sathathormeryt.One tip-off that these were not the delicate Nile flowers depicted in movies? They had been buried with weaponry traditionally associated with their male counterparts, including an ornate dagger in Princess Ita’s sarcophagus.

The theory was that analyzing the remains would allow the researchers to determine whether the weaponry was actually wielded or placed there for show.This task proved challenging as soft tissue had disintegrated into powder despite the meticulous mummification, and some of the bones weren’t preserved with the princesses’ skulls notably getting lost in the early 1900s.Nonetheless, the remaining bones were in good enough condition for the archaeologists to estimate indivi...