A team of leading scientists have disclosed that a mummy, widely identified by western archaeologists as the probable remains of Egyptian ruler, Queen Nefertiti, is in fact a man.



An international debate broke out after Egyptian state archaeologists revealed their own recent examinations of the 3,000-year-old mummy at the centre of the claims had established the skeleton to be that of a male, aged 16-19.

In June this year, America’s Discovery Channel broadcast the first pictures of the mummy, quoting Joann Fletcher, an archaeologist from York University, as saying there was a “strong possibility” the mummy belonged to Nefertiti.



The remains were originally found more than a century ago in a tomb containing other mummies known as KV35 in the Valley of the Kings, near Luxor, southern Egypt. Earlier this year, Ms Fletcher took a new interest in one of the skeletons after she found a royal wig in their tomb and carried out a new inspection of the remains.



During her original inspection, the Egyptologist discovered that the mummy had a double-pierced ear lobe and a bent arm, considered signs of ancient Egyptian royalty. She also claimed that it “bore a striking profile and swanlike neck comparable to the famed beauty Nefertiti”. Yesterday, Hassan Nasrallah, the official spokesman of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, said although the skeleton had been dated to about the same time as Queen Nefertiti’s rule 3,000 years ago, experts had studied it again and it was definitely male. He said: “Our investigations have established the mummy is not Queen Nefertiti, but a teenage male who lived around the same period.”



Dr Nasrallah said any similarity between the mummy’s face and Nefertiti’s statues would not be valid because in the 18th dynasty, “art was idealistic and not realistic”.



But York University continued to stand by Dr Fletcher’s original assessment of the remains, claiming the pelvic bones and evidence of collapsed breasts from the skeleton showed the remains to be those of a woman aged 18-30.



Queen Nefertiti’s beauty has been talked about for thousands of years and in recent months scientists had used the mummified remains at the centre of the controversy to recreate the enigmatic monarch’s face. The story behind the digital reconstruction undertaken by British Egyptologists and crime specialists is to be told in a two- hour film, due to be shown on the Discovery Channel next month.



There have been few important finds linked to Nefertiti, whose name means “the beautiful, or perfect, one has come”.
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