Mummy In the
Deir el-Bahri cache, the mummy of Seqenenre was discovered in 1881. Priests had interred his mummy in the cache, along with Ahmose I,
Amenhotep I,
Thutmose I,
Thutmose II,
Thutmose III,
Ramesses I,
Seti I,
Ramesses II, and
Ramesses IX of the later Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasty. The mummy was unwrapped by
Eugène Grébaut when Professor
Gaston Maspero resigned his office of directorship on June 5, 1886, and was succeeded in the superintendency of excavations and Egyptian archeology by Grébaut. In the same month, Grébaut began the work of unbandaging the mummy of Seqenenre. The history of Seqenenre's reign and revolt against the Hyksos had been considered legendary, but from the wounds present on the body, it was concluded by Maspero that he had died in battle. During the same season, the mummy of Seti I was unbandaged, and also that of an anonymous prince. Maspero provides a vivid description of the injury that was done to the pharaoh at his death: The wound on his forehead was probably caused by a Hyksos axe and his neck wound was probably caused by a dagger while he was prone. A reconstruction of his death by Egyptologist Garry J Shaw and archaeologist and weapons expert Robert Mason suggested a third, which they saw as the likeliest, that Seqenenre was executed by the Hyksos king
Apepi. Garry J Shaw also analysed the arguments for the competing hypotheses and other physical, textual and statistical evidence concluding "that the most likely cause of Seqenenre's death is ceremonial execution at the hands of an enemy commander, following a Theban defeat on the battlefield." His mummy appears to have been hastily embalmed. X-rays that were taken of the mummy in the late 1960s show that no attempt had been made to remove the brain or to add linen inside the cranium or eyes, both normal embalming practices for the time. In the opinion of
James E. Harris and
Kent Weeks, who undertook the forensic examination at the time the X-rays were taken, his mummy is the worst preserved of all the royal mummies held at the Egyptian Museum, and they noted that a "foul, oily smell filled the room the moment the case in which his body was exhibited was opened," which is likely due to the poor embalming process and the absence of the use of absorbing
natron salts, leaving some bodily fluids in the mummy at the time of burial. Also, Harris and Weeks noted in 1973 that "his entire facial complex, in fact, is so different from other pharaohs (it is closest in fact to his son Ahmose) that he could be fitted more easily into the series of
Nubian and Old Kingdom Giza skulls than into that of later Egyptian kings. Various scholars in the past have proposed a Nubian - that is, non-Egyptian-origin - for Seqenenre and his family, and his facial features suggest that this might indeed be true." He was the earliest royal mummy on display in the revamped Royal Mummies Hall at the
Egyptian Museum,
Cairo. In 2021, a
CT scan of his mummy revealed that he died in his forties, possibly on a battlefield, while his deformed hands imply that he was possibly imprisoned with his hands tied, and his facial fractures correlated well with the Hyksos weapons. In April 2021, his mummy was moved to the
National Museum of Egyptian Civilization along with those of 17 other kings and four queens in an event termed the
Pharaohs' Golden Parade. ==Legacy in modern literature==