Princess Ita, who was buried with an elaborate dagger, had robust attachment sites along both forearm bones and at the base of her left pinky. These anatomical changes, the study’s authors say, would have been stressed by using such a weapon.
“When we found that the muscle attachment sites and bone remodeling on their arms and hands corresponded perfectly to the mechanical loads required to draw a bow or grip a dagger,” Hashesh says, “the symbolic argument began to fade in favor of a much more resilient and active reality.”
Other scholars not involved in the work are less convinced.
Wolfram Grajetzki, an Egyptologist at University College London who wasn’t involved in the study, called the study “interesting,” but says he is a proponent of the argument that the weapons are ritual objects.
“It was not common in ancient Egypt to place objects related to professions into burials,” he says. He adds that there were other activities that might explain the bone changes the scientists describe, and that the authors should have also considered a wider range of options.
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‘ Some details of this article were extracted from the following source www.nationalgeographic.com ’
