Wednesday, May 11, 2005

Facial reconstruction of Tutankhamun

http://www.algomhuria.net.eg/gazette/1/
"Dr Zahi Hawass, Secretary-General of the SupremeCouncil of Antiquities (SCA), announced yesterday theresults of three independent attempts to reconstructthe face of Egypt's most famous King, Tutankhamun. Dr Hawass led the efforts to see what King Tut, whodied over 3,000 years ago, might have looked like inlife. Under his direction, three independentartist-scientist teams, one French, one American andone Egyptian, used modern forensic techniques toreconstruct Tut's face". To see the full article, you will need to scroll down this page quite a long way - it is the fifth and last item on the page, highlighted in blue. The article concludes that the reconstructions are all very similar, except in the interpretation of the ears and the end of the nose. It also has a lot of information about the CT scans already described in detail elsewhere, and says that 5 more mummies are going to be scanned as part of a 5 year project to scan all known mummies in Egypt.
Another article on the same subject, but with images (the French reconstruction, the US reconstruction and some related images, including an original scultpure of Tutankhamun, for comparison), is on the BBC website below. It points out that while the other two teams knew that they were reconstructing the head of Tutankhamun, the US team were not given the identity of the mummy.
Other sites containing much the same information are shown below. None of the sites listed below have any images of the reconstruction other than the French and Egyptian ones shown on the BBC website. None show the US reconstruction, which may appear on one of the other news sites later today - if so I'll add a link.
(Sorry that this is all so cramped together - for some reason Blogger has suddenly stopped letting me create spaced paragraphs! Hopefully this is just a temporary thing).

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