Painted throughout ancient Egyptian hieroglyphics are scenes of people at boisterous banquets. On top of the dark, braided heads of some revelers sat peculiar white cones. Archaeologists have long puzzled over the purpose of the mysterious headgear, and whether they were real items worn by people, or just iconographic ornaments, like halos crowning saints in Christian artwork.

Now, a team of archaeologists has uncovered — for the first time — two of the “head cones” in the ancient Egyptian city of Amarna, nearly 200 miles south of Cairo. The cones were made of wax and dated from 1347 to 1332 B.C.E. when Egypt was ruled by the pharaoh Akhenaten, husband to Queen Nefertiti and the supposed father of King Tutankhamen. The finding, which was published Tuesday in the journal Antiquity, provides the first evidence the cones were actual objects and indicates they served some funerary function.

Corina Rogge, a conservation scientist from The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, and an author on the study, said it was very satisfying “to finally be able to say that the head cones are real.”

Salima Ikram, an Egyptologist at the American University in Cairo, who was not involved in the study, called it, “an amazing discovery that has been archaeometrically confirmed.”