Article content continued

“The head had been found on the governor’s coffin, but we were never sure if it was his head or her head,” said Rita Freed, a curator at the museum.

The museum staff concluded only a DNA test would determine whether they had put Mr. or Mrs. Djehutynakht on display.

“The problem was that at the time in 2009 there had been no successful extraction of DNA from a mummy that was 4,000 years old,” Freed said.

Egyptian mummies pose a unique challenge because the desert’s scorching climate rapidly degrades DNA. Earlier attempts at obtaining their ancient DNA either failed or produced results contaminated by modern DNA. To crack the case, the museum turned to the Federal Bureau of Investigation.

The FBI had never before worked on a specimen so old. If its scientists could extract genetic material from the 4,000-year-old mummy, they would add a powerful DNA collecting technique to their forensics arsenal and also unlock a new way of deciphering Egypt’s ancient past.

“I honestly didn’t expect it to work because at the time there was this belief that it was not possible to get DNA from ancient Egyptian remains,” said Odile Loreille, a forensic scientist at the FBI. But in the journal Genes in March, Loreille and her colleagues reported that they had retrieved ancient DNA from the head. And after more than a century of uncertainty, the mystery of the mummy’s identity had been laid to rest.

What Lies in Tomb 10A

Djehutynakht and his wife, Lady Djehutynakht, are believed to have lived around 2000 B.C. during Egypt’s Middle Kingdom. They ruled a province of Upper Egypt. Though the walls in their tomb were bare, the coffins were embellished with beautiful hieroglyphics of the afterlife.