Does Zahi Hawass Believe in the Tooth Fairy?

When Hawass Met Hatshepsut
I don’t know about you, but I was not entirely convinced by the confident and unequivocal identification of Queen Hatshepsut‘s mummy, as shown in exhaustive and dramatic detail last night on the Discovery Channel’s ‘s documentary, Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen. The ennobling of the previously anonymous mummy revolved around the Cinderella glass slipper premise: If the tooth (more or less) fits, it must be the celebrated female pharaoh. The broadcast company had engaged Egypt’s publicity-loving Zahi Hawass, the secretary general of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, to solve the mummy mystery, and he obligingly pursued the case on camera.
Extensive DNA testing and CT scans were done on an array of frightful corpses, but the lucky winner one was chosen because a tooth, detected through scanning, in the female pharaoh’s unopened canopic box (which bears her name) supposedly matched a gap, also viewed through a CT scan, in the previously unidentified mummy’s diseased mouth.
Unsurprisingly, not all experts are convinced, as NY Times writer John Noble Wilford reported last month:
Other Egyptologists not involved in the project said that the finding was fascinating, but that they would reserve judgment until they had studied the results of the DNA analysis and had some of the evidence confirmed by other researchers.
”You have to be so careful in reaching conclusions from such data,” said Kathryn Bard, an Egyptologist at Boston University.
That didn’t stop the Metropolitan Museum, a few days ago, from appearing to endorse Hawass’ discovery in a press release:
Two magnificent statues of Hatshepsut—a woman who ruled ancient Egypt as a pharaoh—are on view at The Metropolitan Museum of Art this summer, in advance of the re-opening of the Museum’s Hatshepsut Gallery later this year. It was announced recently in Cairo that Hatshepsut’s mummy—long thought to be lost—has been identified.
If you want to draw your own conclusions, you can see a replay of the documentary tonight on the Science Channel.
But wait: If you go for the mummy, you might have to miss another highbrow documentary tonight: Simon Schama‘s take on Jacques-Louis David, complete with an actor impersonating the artist. How come no actor had the temerity to pretend to be Rembrandt, last week’s protagonist in PBS’s continuing Monday-night saga, Power of Art?