Archaeology Queen Nefertari's Dismembered Legs Have Been Found Nefertari's mummy was ripped to pieces and tossed around by the ancient robbers, but scientists say they've now likely identified her legs.

A pair of unimpressive mummified legs on display in an Italian museum may belong to one of antiquity's most beautiful women, according to an international team of researchers who have analyzed the more than 3,200-year-old remains for the first time. Consisting of fragmented thigh bones, kneecap and a proximal tibia part (the upper portion of the bone where it widens to help form the knee joint), the body parts are likely those of Queen Nefertari. Not to be confused with Nefertiti, who lived one Dynasty earlier, Nefertari was the first and favorite wife of the mighty warrior pharaoh Ramses II, who reigned between 1290-1224 BC during the early 19th Dynasty. "She is the only queen from the Ramesside era to have been likely identified so far," Egyptologist Michael Habicht at the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine, University of Zurich, Switzerland, told Seeker. RELATED: Mummy Identification Still Uncertain Science The study, detailed in the journal PLOS ONE, indicates the ancient Egyptian beauty was very slim and tall. The information helps reconstruct the life of one of the most intriguing figures of ancient Egypt. "Nefertari is one of the truly great and important queens of Egypt and plays in the league of Hatshepsut, Nefertiti and Cleopatra," Habicht said.

Known for the impressive wall paintings of her lavishly decorated tomb in the Valley of the Queens, which depict her timeless beauty in unusually lifelike form, Nefertari was highly educated and played an active role in foreign politics. However, little is known about her demise. "We know that she gave birth to four sons and four daughters and that she attended the opening ceremony of the rock-cut temples of Abu Simbel in the year 24 of Ramses II's reign. After that event, she disappeared from history," Habicht said. Egyptologists estimate she probably died around her husband's 25th year of reign, having reached an age of about 40 to 50 years. Nefertari's tomb, known as QV66, was heavily plundered in antiquity and her mummy was ripped to pieces and tossed around by the ancient robbers. When Italian diplomat and archaeologist Ernesto Schiaparelli opened the queen's burial in 1904, he found a series of broken remains, including fragments of the pink granite sarcophagus that once held Nefertari's mummy, a pair of sandals and two fragmented mummified legs. Housed at the Egyptian Museum in Turin, Italy, the remains have now been investigated in a multidisciplinary study. "Although no absolute certainty exists, the results speak in favor of an identification of the remains as Nefertari's," lead author Frank Rühli, head of the Institute of Evolutionary Medicine at the University of Zurich in Switzerland, told Seeker. RELATED: Weird Facts About King Tut and His Mummy Anthropometric reconstruction and assessment of the size of the knees revealed they belonged to a woman whose stature ranged between 165 cm (5 foot 5 inches) and 168 cm (5 foot 6 inches). The body height was also independently estimated by professor Maciej Henneberg at the University of Adelaide, Australia, who obtained the same results - a stature of about 165 cm. "Data about women from the New Kingdom and 3rd Intermediate Period show she was probably taller than 84 percent of the women of her time," Rühli said. Analysis of the materials used for embalming showed they were consistent with Ramesside mummification traditions, while X-rays of the left knee pointed to possible traces of arteriosclerosis, suggesting the legs belonged to an elderly person. "The accumulated evidence could point to an individual between 40 and 60 years old," Rühli and colleagues wrote.