Whenever we see Egyptian mummies, we¡¯re often fascinated by the culture and the process of mummification, while also thinking about how the mummified individual looked like, at the prime of their life.?
While most can be left to the imagination, researchers at Academic Clinic Munich-Bogenhausen in Germany didn¡¯t want to stop there.?
Reported first by LiveScience, (study published in PLOSOne) they came across the mummy of a child, from the Greco-Roman era where a painting of the child was embalmed on the casket, with the rest of the body wrapped around with linen bandages -- something that has been seen with traditional Egyptian burial rituals.
This boy¡¯s mummy was discovered in the 1880s in a cemetery not far from the pyramid of Hawara in Lower Egypt, Fayum Region. This region is known to have been home to several Roman period settlements.
In the mummified portrait, the young boy seems to have curly hair braided into two plaits. The portrait also reveals that the boy had brown eyes. However, researchers wanted to learn more about the boy. So they decided to scan his remains using a CT scanner and created a digital 3D image of the boy¡¯s skull.
This scanning also helped in determining the cause of his death, as well as his age at the time of death looking at bones and teeth inside the bandages.?
Researchers discovered residue of condensed lung tissue, which they feel could have caused pneumonia and killed the child. They started with the eyes and reconstructed it based on an average eyeball diameter of 22 millimetres. Later, they inserted the 3D generated eye into the skull.
Next, they reconstructed the nose. According to researchers in a conversation with LiveScience, ¡°The nose was reconstructed according to the Lebedinskaya method, where the piriform aperture is mirrored externally.¡± They took reference from the placement of the child¡¯s canine teeth to get an idea of the width of the nose opening.
The end result was almost exactly identical to the portrait, except the width of the nasal bridge. Researchers explain, ¡°Differences existed between the width of the nasal bridge and the size of the mouth opening, with both being more slender and 'narrow' in the portrait than the virtual reconstruction.¡±
Researchers believe that with little difference between the reconstructed image and the portrait, the latter was made briefly before or after his death.?