One of the most famous mummies in the world is getting a new face to present to the world thanks to digital technology that is reconstructing how her face may have appeared in life.
The corpse known as the Screaming Woman was found in Deir Elbahari in Egypt in 1935, and the woman is believed to have died 3,500 years ago. Her body was unearthed from the family crypt of ancient-Egyptian architect to the royals, Senmut.
Most mummies of that period had their organs removed and separately preserved by embalmers in canopic jars. But the Screaming Woman’s organs were still inside her body, leading researchers to believe that she was poorly embalmed. The face of the mummy was frozen in what appeared to be a wide-mouth scream. Researchers assumed that if the embalmers had been careless enough to leave her organs intact, they may have simply left her mouth open, too.
But that does not seem to be the case. More recent study points to the woman having suffered a very painful death, leading scientists to believe that she spasmed at the time of death, leaving her expression frozen in time.
Now, they’re using computerized technology to reconstruct what she looked like during life. Brazilian graphics artist Cicero Moraes said he combined traditional facial reconstruction techniques with new computerized methods helped along by CT scans of the heads of living people. This data allows him to make fairly accurate estimates of the dimensions and positions of facial structures such as noses and mouths.
Moraes has prepared several versions of the final image, portraying the mummy’s face in various forms. One is called “objective,” meaning that it shows her with her eyes closed and in black and white in order to avoid suggesting what color her eyes or skin may have been.
The other image is called, naturally, subjective, and uses an artist’s judgment of what the woman may have looked like, including color and a recreation of the wig found with the mummy.
Skin color is apparently as controversial in Egyptology as it is for modern Westerners who seem more obsessed with race questions than ever. Moraes said the skin color of Ancient Egyptians “is a source of much controversy,” and not all of it strictly scientific. Political and cultural emotions often contaminate what researchers hope will be a dispassionate exploration.
