Facial Reconstruction Reveals Egyptian 'Mummy Portrait' Was Accurate Except for One Detail
upstart writes in with an IRC submission for nutherguy:
Facial reconstruction reveals Egyptian 'mummy portrait' was accurate except for one detail:
Just after the turn of the first millennium A.D., a young child living in Egypt contracted a deadly illness - most likely pneumonia - and died. His tiny body was prepared for mummification and burial; some of his organs were removed, his remains were wrapped in criss-crossed linen bindings and a portrait of his face was affixed to the front of his mummy.
This so-called "mummy portrait" was part of a popular tradition among some Egyptians in Greco-Roman times, from about the first through the third centuries A.D. But how accurate were these portraits? To find out, a team of scientists in Austria and Germany CT scanned this little boy's body and created a 3D digital reconstruction of his face.
The results show that the portrait was fairly accurate, except for one aspect - the artist made the youngster look older than his 3 or 4 years.
"The portrait shows slightly 'older' traits, which may have been the results of an artistic convention of that time," study lead researcher Andreas Nerlich, the director of the Institute of Pathology at the Academic Clinic Munich-Bogenhausen in Germany, told Live Science in an email.
This single portrait, however, doesn't reveal whether it was a common practice for ancient Egyptian artists to make younger people look older in their mummy portraits.
Journal Reference:
Andreas G. Nerlich, et. al. The infant mummy's face-Paleoradiological investigation and comparison between facial reconstruction and mummy portrait of a Roman-period Egyptian child. PLOS ONE. DOI:10.1371/journal.pone.0238427
Read more of this story at SoylentNews.