The face of an ancient Egyptian boy who died 2,000 years ago was brought to life with modern technology.
On the 21st, local media such as LiveScience reported that a research team at the Institute of Pathology at the Munich-Bogenhausen Academy Clinic in Germany used a CT (Computed Tomography) scanner to develop pneumonia at a young age between 50 and AD 100 at the age of 3-4. It is reported that the face of the deceased boy was restored in 3D.
This work is based on a mummy and'Portrait of a Mummy' found in a cemetery near the Hawara Pyramid in the Paiyum region of Hygypt in the 1880s.
The'mummy portrait' is an Egyptian custom that appeared in the Greco-Roman period, where the body's face was embalmed, covered with a linen bandage, and placed over the face.
Mummy portraits were first discovered in 1887 and more than 1,000 have been unearthed so far.
The boy's mummy portrait was drawn with large brown eyes, a long, thin nose, and a small mouth face with two braided hair along the edge of his forehead from head to ear.
At the Egyptian Museum in Munich, the researchers performed full-body CT scans of the mummies to digitally reconstruct the boy's skull and found condensed lung tissue to reveal that the cause of death was pneumonia.
When comparing the restored 3D image and the portrait, the researchers concluded that the boy's forehead to eye dimensions and the nose to mouth distance were exactly the same, and that the nostril width and mouth size were drawn narrower in the portrait.
Professor Andreas Nerlich, who participated in the study, deduced that "the original and the 3D images are very similar," and that "the portrait would have been made before or after the boy died."
The research paper was published online on PLOS ONE on the 16th.
(Photo = PLOS ONE paper capture, Yonhap News)