The Identity of Ahhotep and the Textual Sources

Many obscure points still remain about the identity of the queen Ahhotep whose mummy was discovered at Dra Abu el-Naga in 1859, in a gilded coffin (Cairo CG 28501) along with many jewels and precious objects. The simplest scenario, that she was the mother of king Ahmose, founder of the Eighteenth Dynasty, collides with many contradictory elements. The article traces the history of the discovery and reviews the theories advanced over time, analyzing the available data and textual sources. It concludes that at least two queens Ahhotep existed at the end of the Seventeenth Dynasty: the owner of CG 28501, a Great Royal Wife who had no sons who became kings, and the mother of the latter king, buried in coffin CG 61006, from the cache of Deir el-Bahri. The paper also discusses the site where the coffin CG 28501 was found and the pertinence of the treasure found within it with the queen. An eyewitness account of the discovery, reported by the archaeologist Howard Carter in some of his unpublished manuscripts, seriously raises the question of the reliability of Mariette’s accounts of the find and provides interesting details. A reassessment of the available information leads to the conclusion that the site where the coffin was found was a cache, where it was hidden to protect it from the violations of the royal burials in the late Twentieth and early Twenty-first dynasties. Whether or not the treasure inside the coffin CG 28501 belonged to Ahhotep is a discriminating factor in defining her position in the dynasty and the identity of her royal spouse. The possibility that the people who hid the coffin had gathered in its case the grave goods from other royal burials must be taken into account. If the treasure was part of her original equipment, the most likely hypothesis is that she was Kamose’s wife. If not, other alternatives are possible and discussed in the paper.