Researchers say the muscle attachments on a 4,000-year-old Egyptian princess’s bones show the wear of years of archery practice, though other bioarchaeologists caution the same wear could have come from other repeated activity

Four sisters, daughters of the Middle Kingdom pharaoh Amenemhat II, were buried at Dahshur roughly 4,000 years ago with bows and other weapons placed in their tombs — arrows specifically recovered from at least one of the four, and from a fifth royal woman buried nearby.

A new analysis of their skeletal remains argues those weapons were not purely ceremonial. Pronounced muscle attachment sites on the bones of several of the women, the study argues, are consistent with the kind of repeated, high intensity strain that comes from years of pulling a bowstring.

Other bioarchaeologists, reading the same kind of evidence, are not convinced the bones can tell the difference between an archer and someone who spent years doing almost any other physically demanding repeated task.

What the skeletons actually show

The study, led by Zeinab Hashesh at Beni-Suef University and published on 17 July 2026 in Frontiers in Environmental Archaeology, examined the remains of Princess Ita, Princess Khenmet, Princess Itaweret, and a provisionally identified Princess Sathathormeryt, along with a fifth royal woman, Noub-Hotep, and one male burial, King Hor. 

All were buried in the royal necropolis at Dahshur, the site Amenemhat II chose for his pyramid complex during a reign generally placed in the nineteenth century BCE, a period Egyptologists regard as one of relative stability and expanded royal building projects. The team’s central evidence is entheseal changes, the roughened, enlarged bone texture that forms where tendons and ligaments attach, and which can thicken over years in response to sustained mechanical loading.

Ita showed enlarged attachment sites on the right shoulder, arm, and hand. Noub-Hotep’s forearm and right hand attachments were notably robust, and arrows were recovered from her tomb specifically. Itaweret showed pronounced development through the shoulder and chest, alongside well healed fractures in her ribs and foot that suggest an active, physically eventful life rather than a sedentary one. Hor’s remains showed asymmetry between the left and right sides of the body, the kind of one sided wear pattern that repeated bow use, drawing predominantly with one arm, would be expected to produce.

Hashesh frames the argument plainly: “Members of the royal family, especially the women, were active participants in skilled, physically demanding activities such as archery and hunting,” she said in a statement. The bows, arrows, and maces found in the tombs, in her reading, were “not just symbolic gifts but tools they actively used.” 

Why other researchers are not ready to agree

The entheseal evidence is consistent with archery. It is not exclusive to it, and that gap is exactly what the sceptics are pointing at. Sonia Zakrzewski, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Southampton, put the core objection directly in comments to Live Science: “The actual cause of that use is uncertain. We cannot say therefore that these skeletal changes necessarily are associated with the use of weaponry.”

Grinding grain, weaving, carrying loads, and a range of other repetitive Middle Kingdom activities can all leave broadly similar marks on bone, and entheseal change research more generally has struggled for years to link specific patterns reliably to specific single activities rather than to general physical strain.

Scott Haddow, a bioarchaeologist at the University of Turin, raised a more specific technical objection: archery is a fundamentally asymmetric activity, working one arm differently from the other, but some of the skeletal changes described in the study read as generalised, bilateral robustness rather than the one sided pattern archery would typically leave. Age, body size, and genetic variation all influence how pronounced these attachment sites become independent of what activity produced them, which muddies any attempt to read a specific sport or skill directly off the bone.

Sébastien Villotte of the French National Centre for Scientific Research raised what may be the more consequential problem for the study’s method rather than its conclusion: the analysis has no comparison group. Without skeletal data from non elite women and men of the same period and region, there is no baseline for knowing whether the entheseal changes found in these particular royal burials were unusual at all, or simply typical of what physical life did to anyone’s bones in Middle Kingdom Egypt regardless of class or occupation. A finding that a princess’s bones show wear only becomes informative once there is something ordinary to compare it against, and that comparison is what the current study does not have.

What is actually at stake in the disagreement

None of the skeptical bioarchaeologists are arguing that Middle Kingdom Egyptian women definitely did not practice archery or hunt. Their objection is methodological: entheseal change analysis, on the evidence so far, is better at showing that a skeleton experienced sustained physical strain than at identifying which specific activity produced it, and a study built mainly around this one method, on this one set of burials, is not enough on its own to settle a question about how Egyptian royal women actually spent their time. The weapons buried alongside these women are suggestive, and Hashesh’s reading of the entheseal evidence as supporting that suggestion is a reasonable interpretation. It is one interpretation among a plausible few, not a demonstrated fact about how Ita, Khenmet, and Itaweret filled their days.

The disagreement says as much about the limits of what bone can tell researchers as it does about these particular princesses. Skeletons record that a body was used hard. They are far less reliable at recording exactly how.

Entheseal change research has been through this cycle before in other contexts, where an initially confident activity specific reading of skeletal wear was later walked back once researchers built larger comparative datasets and found the same markers turning up across people with very different working lives. That history is part of why Zakrzewski, Haddow, and Villotte are raising the comparison group issue now rather than waiting to see how the interpretation holds up on its own. A single study built around six burials from one royal family, however well preserved, sits closer to the start of that cycle than the end of it. The entheseal evidence is consistent with archery, but not exclusive to it, and that gap is exactly what the sceptics are pointing at.