For three years after his 1922 discovery of King Tutankhamun’s tomb, archaeologist Howard Carter did not think much about an undecorated wooden box that turned out to contain two small resin-covered coffins, each of which held a smaller gold-foil-covered coffin. Inside these coffins were two tiny mummies. Preoccupied, Carter numbered the box 317 and did little to study it or its contents, only unwrapping the smaller of the two mummies, which he called 317a. The larger mummy he called 317b. The mummies were not carefully examined until 1932, when they were autopsied and photographed, at which time they were identified as stillborn female fetuses. But the most recent work on these two tiny girls, undertaken by radiologist Sahar Saleem of Cairo University, tells more of their story.

A decade ago, as head radiologist of the Egyptian Mummy Project, Saleem CT scanned the two fetuses, the first time any mummified fetus was studied using this technology. Though there is no evidence of the babies’ personal names—they are identified only by gold bands on the coffins calling them Osiris, the Egyptian god of the dead—they were, in fact, the daughters of Tutankhamun and his wife, Ankhesenamun, and were buried alongside their father after his death. Although both mummies were badly damaged, Saleem found that the girls died at 24 and 36 weeks’ gestation. It was previously known that the older girl, 317b, had had her organs removed as was typical to prepare the deceased for mummification. Saleem found an incision used to remove the organs on the side of 317a, as well as packing material of the sort placed under the skin of royal mummies to make them appear more lifelike. This contradicted the long-held belief that, unlike her sister, the younger girl had not been deliberately mummified.

Similarly, by scanning the mummies, Saleem was able to definitively disprove previous claims that the girls had suffered from congenital abnormalities such as spina bifida. “They got it wrong,” she says. “The damage to their skeletons is a result of postmortem fractures and poor storage. For example, 317b’s elongated head is not a result of cranial abnormalities as has previously been said, but because she has a broken skull.” For Saleem, though, what she has learned about Tutankhamun’s daughters goes beyond these scientific questions. “I try to feel the person as a human in their journey of life,” she says. “Regardless of their age at death, Tut’s daughters were seen as worthy of receiving the most expert mummifications, of a royal burial with their father, and of an afterlife.”

In the century since archaeologist Howard Carter discovered the pharaoh Tutankhamun’s tomb and revealed its magnificent contents to the world, scholars and enthusiasts alike have been fascinated by the insights they provide into the life of a powerful Egyptian ruler more than three millennia ago. By studying some of the more unassuming items in the tomb’s inventory—a set of 11 alabaster vessels—Egyptologist Martin Bommas of Macquarie University has found evidence that Tutankhamun himself also took a keen interest in his country’s past. Bommas says these vessels were originally used by some of Tutankhamun’s illustrious predecessors, whose names are inscribed on them: the pharaoh Thutmose III, who reigned more than a century before Tutankhamun, as well as the boy king’s grandparents Amenhotep III and Tiye.

The vessels held emulsions, creams, and oils, residues of which were still present when Carter opened the tomb in 1922. “These were not artifacts that you put on your mantelpiece, they were in daily use,” says Bommas. “The interesting thing is they were restored over a period of time, perhaps even in Tutankhamun’s lifetime.” Given that such vessels could have been made quite cheaply, the question is why Tutankhamun didn’t request new pots inscribed with his own name. Bommas believes the young pharaoh opted to use these antiquated objects as a way of surrounding himself with the aura of history. “At some point, as part of his education, Tutankhamun would have asked, ‘Who were my forefathers? Who was my granddad?’” says Bommas. “And they would have looked through the palaces and collected the vessels and said something like, ‘This is the pot that Thutmose III used after his Euphrates campaign.’ This would have been a wonderful way for Tutankhamun to link with his past.”

In particular, Bommas suggests, the vessels may have been a way for Tutankhamun to reconnect with traditions that held sway before his father, the pharaoh Akhenaten, shifted Egypt’s religious focus from the creator god Amun-Ra to the god of light, Aten. As Tutankhamun made clear in the so-called Restoration Stela, found in the Karnak Temple, Akhenaten’s religious experiment had been a disaster for the country. “The temple and cities of the gods and goddesses…were fallen into decay and their shrines were fallen into ruin, having become mere mounds overgrown with grass,” he writes. According to Bommas, “The problem for Tutankhamun was to reconnect with the time before Atenism. There was no other way for him but to study history, and these vessels informed him about the importance of the Egyptian past.”

When the pharaoh Akhenaten died, he left no obvious successor. Three of his and his wife Nefertiti’s six daughters had died, and his son, Tutankhaten (later Tutankhamun) was too young to be king. Who would rule Egypt and bring peace back to a land rent by the religious revolution led by Akhenaten? For present-day scholars, too, the answer is far less than evident. The chronology of deaths and inheritors to the throne, which is usually relatively clear in Egyptian history, is extremely murky during this period.

Some have suggested that Akhenaten’s successor was Nefertiti herself. But a particularly interesting alternate theory has recently been advanced by Egyptologist Marc Gabolde of Paul-Valéry Montpellier 3 University. “We are sure that a queen-pharaoh ruled between Akhenaten and Tutankhamun,” he says. “The clues I have gathered allow us to say that it was not Nefertiti, who died a few months before her husband. The ruler is therefore Meritaten.” Meritaten was one of Akhenaten and Nefertiti’s surviving daughters, and Tutankhamun’s older sister. (Other chronologies state that Nefertiti died after Akhenaten.)

Three of the Amarna Letters—a collection of hundreds of cuneiform tablets discovered in Akhenaten’s capital city of Akhetaten in the late nineteenth century—mention Meritaten using the name Mayati. In two of these letters, she is said to have quasi-royal status, Gabolde explains. After Nefertiti’s death, however, Meritaten appears without her previous title of royal daughter, but as “first lady” and later with a nearly royal rank. “This can only be properly explained if she is now becoming queen-pharaoh,” Gabolde says. Furthermore, at least one artifact from Tutankhamun’s tomb, which originally belonged to the queen-pharaoh, has two cartouches side by side, one with her coronation name, Ankhkheperure, and the other her birth name, Meritaten. “This ensures that the queen-pharaoh is none other than Meritaten,” says Gabolde.