Princess Ita's Dagger Was Not Ceremonial

For 130 years, the weapons in their tombs were filed under "probably symbolic." Four princesses, daughters of the pharaoh Amenemhat II, buried at Dahshur around 1850 BCE with bows, arrows and daggers. Scholars assumed the items were ritual, decorative, the kind of objects placed in a tomb to signal status rather than record a life.

The bones disagreed.

The mummies were excavated in the 1890s, then quietly misplaced inside the Egyptian Museum, where they remained lost until a curation project turned them up again in 2020. Researchers finally ran a full bioarchaeological analysis on six royal individuals from the assemblage, a physical read of what the skeletons themselves recorded. What they found is written directly in the bones.

Princess Ita, who died between 28 and 34, had pronounced upper-body muscle attachment points consistent with repeated drawing of a bow. Princess Itaweret, also in her 20s to mid-30s, showed comparable skeletal markers and survived healed fractures in her ribs and foot. Princess Khenmet, who lived into her late 30s or 40s, had robust ligament attachments despite bone thinning, suggesting she stayed physically active well into adulthood. The pattern across multiple individuals is not coincidental: these women used the weapons they were buried with.

What we still don't know is how far this extended. The study covers six individuals from one burial complex in one dynasty. Whether archery and hunting were standard practice among Middle Kingdom royal women more broadly, or specific to this family, remains open. Amenemhat II's daughters may have been exceptional. Or they may have been representative of something historians have been systematically misreading for a century.

Princess Ita's dagger waited in a drawer in Cairo for the better part of a hundred years. It was, it turns out, a primary source.

Read the full story at Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, July 17, 2026

Hot Take: Scholarship spent a century looking at bows, arrows and daggers buried with women and concluding: decorative. The bones had a different filing system.