The former pharaoh of Egypt, Tutankhamun, has been “brought back to life” by scientists using technology to envision what his face may have looked life.
Scientists have come up with a digital recreation of what King Tutankhamun’s face would have looked like when he was the ruler of Egypt more than 3,300 years ago. This was done using the mummified skull as their starting point.
Researchers from Brazil, Australia, and Italy were able to construct the face of this young pharaoh. He had a “life full of obligations” yet had a “delicate face.”
Making things more challenging, they did not have access to the skull itself, only a list of measurements and pictures of the skull.
Brazilian graphics specialist Cicero Moraes explained that “In order to give us a three-dimensional model of the skull, traces of information were combined in a detective-like manner.
With the proportion data and some important cephalometric measurements, it was possible to take the digital skull of a virtual donor and adjust it so that it became the skull of Tutankhamun.
Looking at him, we see more of a young student than a politician full of responsibilities, which makes the historical figure even more interesting.”
Now that their work has come to an end, Mr. Moraes is confident that he and the crew have brought the pharaoh back to life.
“Faced with the studies we have developed with data from living people, comparing projections with actual measurements, we are confident that there is good compatibility with the real face in the general structure,” he said.
Michael Habicht, an Egyptologist at Flinders University in Australia and the co-author of this most recent study, noted that this is not the first attempt to bring the likeness of Tutankhamun to the public eye.
“Our reconstruction is amazingly close to the one made by a French team a few years ago. It also corresponds with the ancient depictions of Tutankhamun, especially with the head on the lotus flower from his tomb treasure,” he said.
The researchers enhanced their final image with features, subjective ones that humanized the portrait. These were created from a series of “CT scans of living persons from several distinct ancestries,” Habicht explained.
