The Younger Lady

Right profile view of the mummy from KV35.

The Younger Lady is the informal name given to a mummy discovered in the ancient Egyptian tomb KV35 by archeologist Victor Loret in 1898. Through DNA tests this mummy has recently been identified as the mother of the pharaoh Tutankhamun. The mummy also has been given the designation KV35YL ("YL" for "Younger Lady") and as 61072, and currently resides in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo.

The mummy was found adjacent to two other mummies in KV35: a young boy who died at around the age of ten, and another, older woman, who has been called The Elder Lady (recently positively identified through genetic testing as being Queen Tiye, as well as being The Younger Lady's mother). All were found together laying naked side-by-side and unidentified in a small antechamber of the tomb. All three mummies had been extensively damaged by ancient tomb robbers.

There has been much speculation as to the identity of the Younger Lady mummy. Upon finding the mummy, Victor Loret had initially believed it be of a young man as the mummy's head had been shaved. A closer inspection later made by Dr. Grafton Elliot Smith confirmed that the mummy was that of a female, though Loret's original interpretation lasted for many years. Recently, DNA test have shown conclusively that the mummy is that of a female, and that she was the mother of Tutankhamun, and by extension a wife of Akhenaten. The results also show that she was also a full-sister to her husband, and that they were both the children of Amenhotep III and Queen Tiye. This family relationship would lessen the possibility that The Younger Lady (and, by extension, Tutankhamun's mother) was Akhenaten's secondary wife Kiya, because no known artifact accords Kiya the title or attribute "the god's daughter." For similar reasons Nefertiti is also made a less likely candidate. The report concludes that the mummy is likely to be either Nebetah or Beketaten, both of whom are daughters of Amenhotep III not known to have married their father, as the most likely candidates for the KV35 Younger Lady.

Description of the mummy

A sketch made by Grafton Elliot Smith of the full body of The Younger Lady mummy, showing the extensive damage done to it.

Grafton Elliot Smith provided an extensive description of the mummy in his survey of the ancient royal mummies at the beginning of the 20th century. He found the mummy to be 1m 58cm in height, and judged her to have been no older than 25 years old at the time of death. He also noted the major damage done by ancient tomb robbers, who smashed the anterior wall of the mummy's chest, and had torn the right arm off just below the shoulder. The right ear had also been broken off, and 38mm x 30mm hole had been punched into the frontal bone of the skull. He found that the embalming method was very similar to that found on Amenhotep II and other contemporaneous mummies, and assumed that she was a member of his royal family.

It had been thought that the large wound in the left side of the mummy's mouth and cheek, which also destroyed part of the jaw, had also been the result of the tomb robber's actions, but a more recent re-examination of the mummy while it was undergoing genetic tests determined that the wound had happened prior to death and that the injury had been lethal.