Ancient Egyptian princesses buried with bows and daggers may have been trained fighters, as 3,800-year-old bones show arm changes and injuries

For more than a century, archaeologists assumed the bows, arrows, and daggers found in the tombs of ancient Egyptian princesses were purely symbolic, the kinds of grave goods that were meant to impress rather than be used. A new study is challenging that assumption. According to the Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology study, ‘Bioarcheological reassessment of Dahshur royal skeletal remains from the Late Middle Kingdom (c. 1850–1700 BCE),’ researchers who re-examined six royal skeletons from the Middle Kingdom discovered bone changes that align almost perfectly with the weapons buried alongside them, suggesting some of these women trained with and wielded those weapons while they were alive.

The remains are of King Hor and five princesses: Ita, Khenmet, Itaweret, Noub-Hotep, and an anonymous woman provisionally identified as Sathathormeryt. They were the daughters and relatives of Pharaoh Amenemhat II, who reigned around 1900 B.C. They were the daughters and relatives of Pharaoh Amenemhat II, who reigned around 1900 B.C.

Lost for over a century, then rediscovered in a museum basement
The story of the survival of these bones is almost as interesting as what they reveal. The tombs were first excavated by French archaeologist Jacques de Morgan in the 1890s, and the remains were transferred to the Egyptian Museum in Cairo in 1915. Then they were more or less forgotten. The bones were left untouched for more than 130 years until they resurfaced in a museum curation project in 2020, offering researchers a rare second chance to study them with modern techniques.

The lead author of the reassessment was Dr Zeinab Hashesh from Beni Suef University in Egypt. Her team examined locations on the skeleton where muscles and ligaments once connected to bone; repeated forceful movement over a lifetime leaves a mark on the skeleton.

What the bones actually showed
The results were striking. Princess Noub-Hotep’s forearm bones and a hand bone showed a slight bowing, changes consistent with the repeated drawing and stabilization of a bow. Princess Ita was buried with a fancy gold and lapis lazuli dagger, and she had strong attachment points in her forearms and a robust ligament near her collarbone, the kind of wear pattern associated with regularly gripping a weapon like a dagger or mace. The Conversation reports that Princess Itaweret also exhibited healed trauma in a rib and a foot bone that might have been caused by a fall or blow, while King Hor had healed fractures in his hand and skull.

Hashesh said the key point is not just that the women were buried with weapons, but that their bodies appear to show signs of having used them. She said the bone modifications matched the weapons recovered from the tombs, indicating real physical activity rather than symbolism.

Why does this challenge old assumptions about gender
Part of what makes this research so interesting is what it says about how archaeology has traditionally read burials. For decades, when researchers found weapons in a grave, they often assumed the person inside was male, even when the skeleton wasn’t carefully examined. This study turns that logic on its head and instead starts with the bones, asking what they tell us about a person's actual life, rather than projecting gender roles based on the objects around them.

That new framing is important to how American readers, especially those raised on pop culture images of Cleopatra or the fictional palace combat scenes in “The Mummy” franchise, might visualize royal women in the ancient world. This study suggests that archery and weapon handling were not necessarily limited to men in the royal court of Egypt.

Not everyone is convinced yet
Still, this is one study, and not everyone agrees with the extent of its conclusions. Anthropologist Sébastien Villotte of the French National Center for Scientific Research pointed out that the study lacks a comparison group of non-royal skeletons from the same period to be able to say for sure that these specific bone markers come from weapon use and not from some other repeated activity.

The researchers themselves acknowledge that more work needs to be done. Future DNA tests may confirm family relationships, and a closer look at the bones may reveal if these women’s activity levels changed with age.

But for now, the evidence offers a fascinating wrinkle to how we think about power, gender, and daily life in the royal households of ancient Egypt, where a princess's dagger might have been a lot more than a beautiful accessory buried for the afterlife.