Scientists succeed in accurately reconstructing the face of an Egyptian child's mummy

 Scientists succeed in accurately reconstructing the face of an Egyptian child's mummy

A team of scientists succeeded in reconstructing the face of an Egyptian mummy belonging to a young child who died between the years 50 BC and 100 AD through "an image" of the child's face and using computer tomography technology.

The scientists uploaded a virtual image of the baby's mummy skull and then embarked on a three-dimensional digital reconstruction of the baby's mummy face, which was found in 1887 and dates back to the Greco-Roman period.

The image of the facial reconstruction is somewhat accurate for the original, but researchers have noted that the painting or image on the mummy makes the child appear older than his real age of 3 or 4 years, according to the British Daily Mail.

Differences between the image and the skull of the child, who was believed to have died of a potentially fatal disease likely to be pneumonia, included the width of the bridge of the nose and the size of the mouth opening, with both being thinner and "narrower" in the image than they really are and after virtual reconstructions of the face.

According to the "Life Science" website, which published the original scientific study, images of mummies were a common practice among some Egyptians during the Greco-Roman era.

The painting was placed on the site of the mummified face, a Roman tradition, while the rest of the body was wrapped in linen bandages, in keeping with traditional ancient Egyptian burial rituals.

The study, published on the "Plus One" website, indicates that more than 1,000 mummy images have been discovered since their first discovery in 1887 in a cemetery near the Hawara pyramid in Lower Egypt, near the Fayoum region, which is known to have housed many settlements. From Roman times with related tombs.

 The painting shows the little boy with curly hair and two braids running along the edge of his forehead and behind the ears. His eyes were brown, and he had a long, thin nose and a small mouth with plump lips. The painting also shows him wearing a pendant with a medallion.

Scientists at the Egyptian Museum in Munich, where the mummy is located, used a CT scanner to create a digital image of the child's skull.

They were able to determine the child's age at death after analyzing the bones and teeth inside the bandages, in addition to identifying the cause of death, as it is believed that he died of pneumonia after discovering "the remnants of condensed lung tissue," according to the study's lead researcher Andreas Nerlich, director of the Institute of Science. Pathology at the Academic Clinic in Munich, Bogenhausen, Germany.

Then the team of scientists reconstructed the face, starting from the child's eyes, and based on the average diameter of the eyeball of 22 mm, adjusting it to take into account his age, and then installing it in the eye socket in the 3D skull.

According to the study, the nose was reconstructed using the location of the child's canines to determine the width of the nostril, while they used the colors in the painting to determine the pigment of the eyes and the color of the hair.

The researchers wrote in the study that the facial reconstruction was "quite similar" to a child's face painting, 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 of the face."

However, there were differences between the width of the bridge of the nose and the size of the mouth opening, with both being thinner and narrower in the panel than in the 3D reconstruction.