The Burial of Queen Ahhotep

Returning lecturer Peter Lacovara, Director of The Ancient Egyptian Heritage and Archaeology Fund and author of the forthcoming The Triumph of Thebes, discusses the burial of Queen Ahhotep. Her gilded coffin, magnificent jewels, and decorated ceremonial objects were discovered in Thebes by French Egyptologist Auguste Mariette in 1859. Among the ornaments were fly pendants associated with military honor. They mirror Queen Ahhotep’s role recorded in a Karnak inscription: “The princess, the king’s mother, the noblewoman who knows things and takes care of Egypt.”