Carter later found another tomb, dubbed KV60, almost directly beneath Hatshepsut's.
That tomb held the two female mummies, with the smallish woman lying in a large, open sarcophagus and the heavier woman lying on the floor.
As part of their search for Hatshepsut's true identity, researchers retrieved the larger mummy from the tomb and performed CT scans of both mummies, known family members, and other artifacts related to the queen.
One of the objects examined was a wooden box of Hatshepsut's internal organs, which was found at a third location. Removing the organs of the deceased and placing them in sacred vessels was part of the ancient Egyptian mummification process.
A scan of the box revealed a rare nugget: a broken molar.
Only one of the two mummies was missing a molar—the larger woman—and the tooth perfectly matched a gap in her upper jaw.
DNA tests also suggest a close familial relationship between that mummy and the mummy of Hatshepsut's grandmother, Amos Nefreteri, Hawass said.
"First Great Woman"
Hatshepsut caused a stir in Egypt because she portrayed herself in the vestments of a man during her 21-year reign in Egypt's 18th Dynasty, which lasted from 1550 to 1292 B.C.
Historians have viewed her both as a brazen usurper and a gender-bending innovator.
The eldest daughter of the pharaoh Tuthmose I, Hatshepsut married her half-brother Tuthmose II and served in the traditional role of queen until his death around 1479 B.C.
A young son by another wife was slated to become pharaoh upon her husband's death. But backed by the clergy, Hatshepsut ruled Egypt as regent in the name of the boy-king, Tuthmose III.
Over the next decade, she declared herself a pharaoh and ruled as co-king with her stepson. Art from this period shows her wearing feminine garb but capped with the headdress of a male king.
Eventually Hatshepsut was depicted in statues and wall carvings as a fully male ruler: bearded, bare-chested, and without breasts.
(Related news: "Egyptian 'Female King' Gets Royal Treatment" [April 10, 2006].)
Hatshepsut's reign, ending with her death in 1458 B.C., was considered a successful one. She was a prolific builder and expanded Egyptian trade.
She "stands perhaps as history's first great woman; without a doubt she was the first great female ruler," Egyptologist Dennis Forbes wrote in 2005.
After her death, Tuthmose III took pains to erase records of his stepmother's reign, which could be one explanation for her empty tomb and the mummies buried below it.
In 1906 the mummy found in the coffin in KV60 was taken to the Egyptian Museum, where it sat for a century in a third-floor storeroom.
Debate lasted for decades about whether the mummy in storage was Hatshepsut, or if the larger mummy left in the tomb was the real queen.
Last year Hawass asked curators to locate the smaller KV60 mummy in storage at the Egytian Museum. Inscriptions on the side of the sarcophagus read, "Great Royal Nurse, In."
This and other evidence led scientists to believe that KV60 was the tomb of Hatshepsut's beloved nurse, Sittre-In.
Hawass and other experts conjectured that ancient Egyptian priests had moved Hatshepsut's mummy there to outwit tomb robbers.
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