Ancient Egyptian Queens Aat and Hetepti

Senusret's son, Amenemhat III, built two pyramids, one at Dahshur and one at Hawara. His Dahshur pyramid was abandoned when it became structurally unsound, but it was not left empty. On the south face of the pyramid two separate entrances led to two tombs built within the pyramid mass and linked via a corridor both to each other and to the king's unused chambers. One tomb, belonging to Queen Aat, has yielded a pink granite sarcophagus similar to that provided for the king's abandoned burial, a canopic chest, sundry burial equipment and enough skeletal material to show that Aat died in her mid-30s. The other tomb, provided for an anonymous lady, has yielded the remains of a plundered burial including another pink granite sarcophagus. As there is no known tomb for the King's Mother Hetepti, mother of Egypt's next king, Amenemhat IV, it may be that this tomb belonged to her. Both tombs included a "Ka chamber" to house the canopic chest, a chamber that had up until now been the prerogative of kings. The increasing democratization of the afterlife was allowing dead queens to assume some kingly privilidges.

Princes Ptahnefru
Amenemhat III was to be the last powerful king of the Middle Kingdom. His reign had seen accomplished building works, ambitious irrigation and land reclamation schemes and a series of successful mining expeditions, and this evident prosperity makes it difficult to understand how much a robust dynasty could suddenly fail. It has been suggested that the over-large royal family was plagued with infighting at this time, but there is little evidence to support this theory, and it may be that 12th Dynasty suffered from something as simple as lack of a suitable male heir.
Support for this hypothesis comes from the burial chamber of Amenemhat's Hawara pyramid. Here an additional sarcophagus was included for the burial of the King's Daughter Ptahnefru, either Amenemhat's own daughter or, less likely, his sister. It is difficult to reconstruct the precise sequence of events in the burial chamber, but it seems that Ptahnefru, having died unexpectedly, was interred in her father's tomb while the builders completed her own monument. She was then moved just over a mile away to her own pyramid, a structure that is today almost totally destroyed and disastrously waterlogged. This pyramid was investigated by Labib Habachi (1936) and Naguib Farag (1956), and has yielded a series of grave goods including a beaded falcon collar, flail, apron, bracelet, strips of rotted mummy bandage and a granite sarcophagus inscribed with Ptahnefru's name. Unfortunately Ptahnefru's body had been destroyed by the infiltrating floodwater. The evidently close relationship between Amenemhat III and his daughter, combined with Ptahnefru's assumption of a cartouche in her later inscriptions, suggests that she, rather than a royal son, was being groomed to follow her father on the throne.