The nameless tomb of the woman with the missing molar

Beneath the shifting dunes, a secret lies cradled in a plain, nameless tomb. It sits near the mouth of another grave, reached by a jagged set of stairs descending into the hollow earth. Here, the stone walls offer no inscriptions, and the atmosphere hangs heavy with the dust of the long-forgotten.

In a low room, a woman of great girth lies still. She had lived many years before the end, bearing the physical marks of a life of poor health. Decay had taken hold of her teeth, and a single molar root was retained in her jaw after being extracted just before she died. Some believe a wasting sickness destroyed part of her hip while others suggest she suffered from diabetes. Her fingernails are tinted red and outlined in black.

For long spans of time, she walked as a nameless ghost. Some scholars suggest she is Hatshepsut, the monarch who reigned with the power of a king. They claim a solitary tooth found in a far cache mirrors the void left in her own jaw. Still, the stones provide no answers, and the identity of the mummy remains a subject of debate among Egyptologists.

She remains in the shadows of the Valley of the Kings, a hushed realm where a lonely mummy dwells in a wooden casket, left behind after a 1989 excavation. The tomb is located just in front of the entrance to the tomb of Mentuherkhepshef, where the woman rests in a chamber roughly 5.5 by 6.5 metres wide.

Sources: Wikipedia, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata, Wikimedia Commons