Often hailed as the “greatest pharaoh” in Egyptian history, II. Ramses is a man with many faces. In sculptures and paintings dating back more than 3000 years, the holy lord is depicted as a handsome, pious man with a round face, protruding nose and high cheekbones. His mummy, found in 1881, contains less subjective details. Over the years its structure has been used many times by scholars, historians and artists to recreate the pharaoh’s face.
Depending on where you look online, pharaoh’s eyes range from bead to bug-eyed. And the shape of his face is depicted as either round and stocky or tall and slender.
Researchers at Liverpool John Moores University in the United Kingdom have joined forces with Sahar Salem, an Egyptian mummy expert and professor of radiology at the University of Cairo, to “digitally open” the pharaoh’s remains and visualize his face in greater detail than ever before.
The work was done with care. Computed tomography and photographs of the mummy, now in the National Museum of Egyptian Civilization in Cairo, were combined with historical data to create the pharaoh’s bony face.
Caroline Wilkinson, forensic anthropologist and head of the Facial Laboratory at Liverpool John Moores, says the most distinctive features of the mummy’s face are a strong jaw and a wide nasal bone that sits “very high and very prominently, between the eyes.”
Once the general structure of the face was determined, the information was embedded in the same software used in crime reconstructions. The researchers reconstructed the overlying muscles and ligaments based on underlying bones and facial muscle thickness measurements in Egyptian populations.
“The stronger the muscle at the point of attachment, the more visible marks its attachments will leave on the surface of the skull,” explains Wilkinson.
The result is an old man with a long face, wide eagle nose, close-knit eyes, thick gray eyebrows, and a wide mouth with a thin upper lip, as seen below.
The final layers added to the reconstruction were the skin and hair of the pharaoh.
The skin tone was chosen based on what was believed to be common in Egypt at the time. Meanwhile, her hair color was based on evidence suggesting she once wore full red hair, including microscopic studies of Ramesses II’s curls and other blonde-haired mummies.
In ancient Egypt, red hair was perceived as a religious trait, feared and respected by them, and during World War II. Ramses himself was often depicted as a god in paintings. It is unclear whether Ramses II’s red hair gave him an advantage as a leader, or whether the red hair became a sign of leadership in part because of his success.
While we can never be sure what this venerable monarch once looked like, Wilkinson told Newsweek his team has tested facial reconstruction techniques using CT scans of living donors and found that 70 percent of the details are within millimeters of the real human face.
It is believed that Ramses II died at the age of 92 after his 66-year reign from 1279 to 1213 BC, meaning his mummy was frozen in old age. With all that said, Wilkinson, Salim and team used 3D age regression to recreate a younger version: a middle-aged Ramses at the height of his reign. Source
Source: Port Altele
