Egypt's Lost Queen

In what is being called the most important find in Egypt's Valley of the Kings since the discovery of King Tutankhamun's tomb, Discovery Channel's Secrets of Egypt's Lost Queen exclusively reveals archaeological, forensic and scientific evidence identifying a 3,000-year-old mummy as Hatshepsut, Egypt's greatest female Pharaoh. During the summer of 2003, Cooney worked on the return of the King Tut exhibition to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, as well as researched a number of Egyptian pieces for inclusion in the Museum Loan Network database. She was also involved with the installation of the Cairo Museum exhibit "Quest for Immortality: Treasures of Ancient Egypt," which opened at the National Gallery of Art in Washington D.C. (where she was the Samuel H. Kress fellow) in the summer of 2002.

Cooney is currently a postdoctoral teaching fellow at Stanford University and is revising her dissertation, "The Value of Private Funerary Art in Ramesside Period Egypt," for publication. She is also working on a number of research interests, including the gender issues of death in ancient Egypt, craft specialization and funerary arts in the ancient world, the Nubian 25th Dynasty's racial identity and political legitimating process, and the socioeconomic understanding of death rituals and associated material culture in ancient Egypt. She has taught courses at Howard University and UCLA in Egyptian religion, language, literature, art and archaeology.More powerful than Cleopatra or Nefertiti, Hatshepsut stole the throne from her young stepson, dressed herself as a man, and in an unprecedented move, declared herself Pharaoh. Though her power stretched across Egypt and her reign was prosperous, Hatshepsut's legacy was systematically erased from Egyptian history — historical records were destroyed, monuments torn down and her corpse removed from her tomb.The film follows a team of top forensic experts and archaeologists led by Dr. Zahi Hawass, Egypt's secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiquities, as they use the full range of forensic technology to identify Hatshepsut.

The investigative journey of Dr. Hawass and his team led them through the massive crypts beneath Egypt and into the depths of the Cairo Museum. Using knowledge of royal Egyptian mummification and clues from two known tombs linked to Hatshepsut, the team narrowed their search for Hatshepsut to just four mummies from thousands of unidentified corpses."The discovery of the Hatshepsut mummy is one of the most important finds in the history of Egypt," said Dr. Hawass. "Her reign during the 18th Dynasty of ancient Egypt was a prosperous one, yet mysteriously she was erased from Egyptian history. Our hope is that this mummy will help shed light on this mystery and on the mysterious nature of her death."

Applied Biosystems and Discovery Quest, part of Discovery Channel's initiative to support the scientific community's work, funded the construction and equipment for the first-ever DNA testing facility located outside the Cairo Museum in Egypt for the program. The DNA testing facility will not only be used to extract and compare the mitochondrial DNA of the Hatshepsut mummy and mummies from her family, but will also be used by scientists to examine future finds in Egypt.