Reconstruction of the face of an Egyptian mummy provides an accurate picture of what it was like

A team of scientists in Austria and Germany examined the body of a young boy who had been embalmed and buried after removing some of his organs, then his remains were wrapped in intersecting linen covers, and a picture of his face was affixed to the front of his mummy, so the team worked on a three-dimensional digital reconstruction of his face.  

The "mummy image" was part of a common tradition among some Egyptians in the Greco-Roman period, from about the first century to the third century AD.

The results show that the image was fairly accurate, except for one side, through which the painter made the boy appear 3 or 4 years older, according to the study's lead researcher Andreas Nerlich, director of the Pathology Institute at the Academic Clinic in Munich Bogenhausen, Germany.

However, this photo does not reveal whether this was a common practice for ancient Egyptian artists to make young men look older in their portraits on the mummy.

Of the nearly 1,000 mummy portraits recovered from Greco-Roman Egypt, only about 100 remain attached to the mummy.

For the project, which is the first of its kind to compare a mummy image of a young child from ancient Egypt with the reconstruction of his face, researchers chose the mummy of this boy, which was found in the eighties of the nineteenth century in a tomb near the pyramid of Hawara, southwest of Cairo.

The 30-inch (78 cm) mummy, which dates from between 50 BC to AD 100, is now in the Egyptian Museum in Munich.

The team examined the mummy, and examined x-rays taken from the mummy in 1984, so that they could create a digital, three-dimensional image of the boy's body.

A CT scan revealed the removal of the boy's brain and some of his stomach organs, a common practice during embalming in ancient Egypt. 

Nerlich said the growth of the bones and teeth revealed the age of the boy when he died, most likely from pneumonia.

They note the "condensed remnants of lung tissue" on the CT scan.

To reconstruct the appropriate thickness of the skin, the researchers relied on criteria taken from modern children between the ages of 3 and 8.

Much of the reconfigured face depended on the shape of his skull and teeth, the researchers said, while the boy's skin, hair color and hair style depended on the painting.

The researchers wrote in the study that the facial reconstruction was "very similar" to the image, where the dimensions of the forehead to the eye line, and the distance from the nose to the mouth "were exactly the same between the image and the reconstruction."

They continued, "However, there were differences between the width of the bridge of the nose and the size of the mouth opening, as both are more slender and" narrow "in the image than the virtual reconstruction."

The two are very similar, Nerlich said, as "most likely the picture was prepared in a short period before or after his death."