Brazilian researchers recreate Tutankhamun’s face – 06/06/2023 – Science

A little over a century after the discovery of his tomb, the mysterious Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun (1341 BC – 1323 BC) has just received a new facial reconstruction. Made by a multidisciplinary team, which includes two Brazilians, the image gives a realistic look to the historical character and confirms previous research that pointed to deformities in his face.

The material will be published this month in the scientific journal Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology, the official journal of the Italian Society of Anatomy and Histology.

“The results suggest maxillary prognathism and mandibular retrognathism”, says the text, in its conclusion. In other words, Tutankhamen had a marked appearance with a very retracted chin and a protruding upper side of the mouth, which gave him the appearance of a big nose.

Among the five authors of the work, a multidisciplinary team formed by researchers from the Forensic Anthropology, Paleopathology and Bioarchaeology Research Center Acta Palaeomedica, from Sicily, Italy; the Arc-Team Brazil project; from Flinders University in Adelaide, Australia; and from the Federal University of Uberlândia are two Brazilians.

They are the 3D designer Cicero Moraes, who accounts for around one hundred facial reconstructions of religious and historical characters, and the dentist Thiago Beaini, professor of Forensic Dentistry at the teaching institution in Uberlândia.

In conversation with Sheet, Moraes explains that the work, technically, is qualified as “a facial approximation based on statistical and anatomical data”. “The most we can deliver in the case of Tutankhamun is a bust with eyes closed, in grayscale and without hair. Such data is more plausible, as it is something addressed in two- and three-dimensional projections, that is, it is the part objective part of the job”, he says.

“Despite being more consistent with the data, the objective version is not very pleasing in the eyes of the general public and as this is a historic project, which will be presented to the general public, we opted for the generation of images with more speculative data such as pigmented skin , facial hair and make-up according to published historical data”, completes the designer.

Emphasizing that there are other versions of similar work already carried out, dentist Beaini recalls that “the digital technique, improved by Cicero Moraes in many aspects, allows capturing compatible skull models on skull records that are only available in museums”.

Interest in the atypical

Moraes says that the desire to study the physiognomy of the famous pharaoh was motivated by the well-known facial deformity. “I’m developing a sample of digital approximations of people with atypical skulls and bone and facial diseases, and Egypt appeared among the subjects studied”, he comments.

As researchers say in the article and other previous research also reports, it is believed that the custom of marriages between brothers or very close relatives in the dynasty to which Tutankhamun belonged caused many of its members to be born with deformations and developed serious illnesses.

Tutankhamun, for example, was the result of his father’s relationship with his sister. He himself is said to have married a half-sister, with whom he had two daughters—neither survived infancy. Previous studies report that one of the daughters was born prematurely, at five or six months of gestation, and did not survive the delivery. The other had spina bifida, scoliosis, and Sprengel deformity.

Previous studies indicated that the pharaoh had facial deformities —confirmed in the work of Moraes and team—, in addition to scoliosis, deformities in his left foot, among other problems, such as probably Köhler’s bone disease. Possibly he contracted malaria, as more than one strain of the parasite that transmits the disease was found in his tomb.

How the work was done

The team relied on previous studies, including images taken of the pharaoh’s remains. And it had the help of the most contemporary technological tools, of course.

Tutankhamun’s tomb was discovered in 1922 by British archaeologist Howard Carter (1874-1939). His death mask soon became a pop symbol. According to the chronology detailed in the scientific article, “only in 1968 were the first X-ray images taken on this body”.

In 2005, the pharaoh’s remains underwent a detailed CT scan. Five years later, a DNA test was carried out, which brought new information about the Egyptian nobleman’s health and family ties.

Moraes reports that this context was appropriated by his work, but the method used for the facial approximation was the one already established by him in other studies. “We distribute [sobre o crânio] a series of projections and proportions that provide the size of the lips, the position of the eyeballs, the height of the ears, the frontal size of the nose and some information about the expected dimensions of the lower part of the skull”, he says.

“All these projections are based on statistical studies that were carried out on living individuals of several different ancestries”, he details. “Having the frontal data, we then set out to trace the profile of the face, which we do through a combination of soft tissue thickness markers, which inform the limits of the skin, based on a study carried out in modern Egyptians with measurement by ultrasound and We complemented it with the tracing of the nose, designed with data extracted from studies developed by our own team, as well as measurements on CT scans.”

“We still have one more aid element, which is anatomical deformation. This technology consists of using the skull and soft tissue of a virtual donor that is adjusted until the donor’s skull becomes the skull of Tutankhamun, causing the skin follows the deformation, resulting in a face compatible with the approximate individual”, he adds. “We finalized the process by generating two versions of the face, an objective one and a more speculative one.”