Modern technology at work! Here are two renditions (center and right) of what
Meresamun may have looked like, based upon CT scans of her mummy. The image on the left is from her mummy cartonnage case and at the time of Meresamun's death, would not have been intended to be a true representation of what she looked like (that happened much later in Egyptian history) but was, rather, an idealized image.
Getting By On Her Looks
"
Priestess of Amun"
by Eti Bonn-Muller
Using crystal-clear 3-D images from Meresamun's historic scans, two forensic artists reconstruct the face of a 2,800-year-old Egyptian priestess
She was more than just a pretty face. The ancient Egyptian
Meresamun, who lived around 800 B.C., was a working girl, a priestess-musician who served Amun, the preeminent deity of Thebes. Her mummified remains, sealed 2,800 years ago in a skintight coffin of cartonnage (layers of linen and plaster), were examined by researchers at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute in September 2008 using the latest in CT scanning technology, a "256-slice" machine that produced startlingly vivid images. For months, she has since been the immensely popular subject of the Oriental Institute Museum's exhibition,
The Life of Meresamun: A Temple Singer in Ancient Egypt.
Now, the headline-making CT images have helped two individuals--each working separately with 3-D STL (stereolithography) images of Meresamun's skull produced from the scans, but using different techniques--reconstruct Meresamun's face. Michael Brassell is a Baltimore-based forensic artist for NamUs (pronounced "name us"), the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System established by the National Institute of Justice. He created traditional hand-drawn pencil sketches (digitally colored for an "artsy" effect), using the exact same methods he employs when helping the police track down a cold-case victim. Josh Harker, a forensic artist who lives in Chicago and was originally trained as a sculptor, worked digitally, leveraging the latest software and imaging technology.
"I was delighted to have two very different techniques," says Emily Teeter, an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute Museum and curator of the Meresamun exhibition. "How often do you look at a police sketch in the paper--of some creep or some unfortunate missing person--and say, 'Yeah, I wonder if they really looked like that?' But there is a lot of similarity between the two reconstructions." The main differences, she points out, are in the shapes of the chin and the nose. "But they both have the same overbite, very much the same cheekbones, and the same shape of the eyes."
Rest of article at Archaeology (online).
Modern technology at work! Here are two renditions (center and right) of what Meresamun may have looked like, based upon CT scans of her mummy. The image on the left is from her mummy cartonnage case and at the time of Meresamun's death, would not have been intended to be a true representation of what she looked like (that happened much later in Egyptian history) but was, rather, an idealized image.
Getting By On Her Looks
"Priestess of Amun"
by Eti Bonn-Muller
Using crystal-clear 3-D images from Meresamun's historic scans, two forensic artists reconstruct the face of a 2,800-year-old Egyptian priestess
She was more than just a pretty face. The ancient Egyptian Meresamun, who lived around 800 B.C., was a working girl, a priestess-musician who served Amun, the preeminent deity of Thebes. Her mummified remains, sealed 2,800 years ago in a skintight coffin of cartonnage (layers of linen and plaster), were examined by researchers at the University of Chicago's Oriental Institute in September 2008 using the latest in CT scanning technology, a "256-slice" machine that produced startlingly vivid images. For months, she has since been the immensely popular subject of the Oriental Institute Museum's exhibition, The Life of Meresamun: A Temple Singer in Ancient Egypt.
Now, the headline-making CT images have helped two individuals--each working separately with 3-D STL (stereolithography) images of Meresamun's skull produced from the scans, but using different techniques--reconstruct Meresamun's face. Michael Brassell is a Baltimore-based forensic artist for NamUs (pronounced "name us"), the National Missing and Unidentified Persons System established by the National Institute of Justice. He created traditional hand-drawn pencil sketches (digitally colored for an "artsy" effect), using the exact same methods he employs when helping the police track down a cold-case victim. Josh Harker, a forensic artist who lives in Chicago and was originally trained as a sculptor, worked digitally, leveraging the latest software and imaging technology.
"I was delighted to have two very different techniques," says Emily Teeter, an Egyptologist at the Oriental Institute Museum and curator of the Meresamun exhibition. "How often do you look at a police sketch in the paper--of some creep or some unfortunate missing person--and say, 'Yeah, I wonder if they really looked like that?' But there is a lot of similarity between the two reconstructions." The main differences, she points out, are in the shapes of the chin and the nose. "But they both have the same overbite, very much the same cheekbones, and the same shape of the eyes."
Rest of article at Archaeology (online).
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