Facial reconstruction of ancient Egyptian woman

Angela

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I post this merely for fun. I don't put much credence in these things.

http://www.archaeology.org/news/4801-160830-mummy-skull-reconstruction

"Live Science reports that a team of researchers, including an imaging specialist, a forensic Egyptologist, and a sculptor, reconstructed the face of an Egyptian mummy whose head was discovered in the collections of the University of Melbourne. The wrappings and style of embalming suggest that the person lived at least 2,000 years ago. A computed tomography (CT) scan of the embalmed head revealed that the mummy’s skull was intact, and that the individual suffered from two tooth abscesses. The scans also allowed the scientists to measure the skull. Its size suggests it belonged to a woman who was probably not more than 25 years old when she died. “We noticed that the top of her skull is very thin. It is extremely porous,” added biological anthropologist Varsha Pilbrow of the University of Melbourne. This condition may have been brought on by malaria or a flatworm infection. The researchers think the mummy’s head came to the university in the early twentieth century among the collections of archaeologist Frederic Wood Jones. To read about a recently discovered tomb containing a mummy, go to "Tomb of the Chantress.""

Tut also suffered from a very bad malarial infection. It was ubiquitous. Still was up until a few decades ago. My father got it from working in North Africa. In his fifties he would still occasionally get an attack.

Egyptian-Mummy-Woman.jpg


Egyptian-Woman.jpg


This is another reconstruction of a female mummy's face:
http://www.japantimes.co.jp/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/f-mummies-a-20150915.jpg
f-mummies-a-20150915.jpg


This is part of the reason I don't trust them...

A reconstruction of Cleopatra:
article-1095043-02CFBB40000005DC-200_468x378.jpg



Contemporary representations of Cleopatra, who was, I would point out, 100% Greek in terms of genetics.

cleopatra-busts.jpg


The bones are roughly similar, but the nose, and, of course, the pigmentation, are totally off.
 
This is a reconstruction of another Egyptian woman from around the same time:
9aec6c8b30d5ccabd119a49833ed5b6c.jpg


Same general type, yes?

They look much more generic "Mediterranean" than this bust of Nefertiti. Either the artists are "interpreting" the results more in that manner, or the Egyptians changed between those two eras.

2B4390A300000578-3193092-image-a-6_1439280888159.jpg


21.jpg


Here is King Tut:
tut-reconstruction.jpg


Nesperennub:
img_2247.jpg


Ramses the Great:
recon-ramses1.jpg


There must have been a lot of variation not only chronologically, but even within one general era.
 
Yeah all it took was that one mistake to encourage me to question its accuracy. So an actual dna test was conducted on cleopatra's bones, correct? Id love to see that.

I think Ramses looks the most "mediterranean" out of all of them.
 
Here's some more accurate, imo, reconstructions of her, as they are at least based on contemporary representations:

hqdefault.jpg


It matches the contemporary coins much more:
20120218-cleo%20coin.jpg


Other coins are more forgiving of her nose.
tumblr_m7btftqEAT1qiu1coo1_500.jpg


This one is good, I think, as it's based on the coins, and it presents a very Greek looking woman.
maxresdefault.jpg
 
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She looks caucasoid and she resembles most of modern Egyptians. Cleopatra was of Macedonian ethnicity afaik.
 
Yes, Cleopatra was as ancient Macedonian as anybody could be, I guess, as she was the result of brother/sister incest going back for generations. A few were half siblings, but still, that's some concentration of genes.

I think she bears quite a resemblance to Christina Onassis. Her father was an Anatolian Greek, and she looks a lot like him.

Here she is with her daughter:
hs_cruising_christinao_christinaonassis_athina_03.jpg


Going by Cleopatra, modern Macedonians may look quite a bit different from ancient Macedonians. Of course, maybe there was some variation among them.

@Davef...

I don't think that reconstruction of Ramses looks very "Mediterranean". Look at the skull, and even the features. He looks how I would imagine some of the Hittites would have looked.

I think people make this mistake a lot. "Mediterranean" doesn't equal Near Eastern. The "Mediterranean" component, and phenotype, in most Middle Easterners isn't all that high anymore. All of the "modeling" that people are doing bears that out. You can find some "Mediterranean" looking Middle Easterners, but they're in the minority. There's nothing "Mediterranean" looking about Kurds, for example, or other ethnic groups in Turkey etc. or Saudis or even many Lebanese and Syrians. There's been a lot of population turnover in the Middle East since the farmers left.
 
You're right, its just that in comparison to the images above him he seems more in comparison . In spite of that, I don't expect that look to be commonly found in Greece. The latest reconstruction of cleopatra you have shown definitely fits the profile more so than any other.

Not to worry, I'm not one who believes that Saudis Iraqis Kurds and Iranians are "Mediterraneans" especially since they never plot with greeks, italians, Sardinians,
Cypriots etc. then again "mediterranean" is somewhat of a broad term IMO it can cover Spaniards and cypriots, and those two groups are vastly different genetically.

I don't claim to be an expert, it's just that i see the classification as somewhat broad and vague.
 
I'm not "worried" about any comparisons made with regard to Italy, if that's what you're implying. You shouldn't assume that normal people have the same preoccupations as the denizens of anthrofora.

My point is that this isn't theapricity; we shouldn't be making up our own descriptions of anthropological "phenotypes". If you're going to go by that, go to the researchers who wrote about it and use their definitions.

The way I see it, as I said, "Mediterranean looking" does not equal Middle Eastern or Near Eastern looking, although there are Mediterranean looking people in the Middle East.

Before you go talking about "vast" differences, I would go look at some FST statistics. There aren't vast differences between any West Eurasian populations, with the exception of North Africans, because of their heavy SSA component and some Indians, because of the ASE.

As for Europeans, the group with the largest FST distance to all Europeans is the Finns. That makes sense because of the, what, 8% Siberian/Han admixture. Still, that, or the genetic border which Novembre et al found for southern Italians in particular, are not indications of "vast" genetic differences. Since the great admixture events of 5000 years ago, Europeans are very similar to one another.

I just looked up a few of them. Interestingly, Greeks and Southern Italians have an FST of 0. so much for PCAs showing two components, and all the reliance on them.
 
It's ok. I'm glad this isn't theapricity where skinheads rule supreme!

I know you don't roll around at night worried about what can be considered "Mediterranean" or whether some 16 year old over an internet connection with a username of "Thor the Viking Lord" will consider you as "european."....

In response to the fst comment, i keep learning something new here. I don't recall ever reading a single comment on an anthro forum stating that the distance between west Eurasians is very small, but take comfort bc I believe you. I guess other forums try desparately to get others to believe that group x is a completely different creature from group y so they can sever ties from ethnicities they don't like (south euros, jews , North Africans ,levantines, Caucasus groups and Arabs get hit the worst). I guess the pca is the secret weapon.

Seems that it takes a small part of the genome to break groups apart. I don't know exactly how I figured this out but its based on certain patterns I've picked up over the past two months starting from when I registered here. I guess you can probably separate Russians from the English and have them plot far from each other by focusing on small specific areas where they differ and ignoring the larger areas where they mesh (ie general patterns mostly seen in Northern Europeans).
 
It's ok. I'm glad this isn't theapricity where skinheads rule supreme!

I know you don't roll around at night worried about what can be considered "Mediterranean" or whether some 16 year old over an internet connection with a username of "Thor the Viking Lord" will consider you as "european."....

In response to the fst comment, i keep learning something new here. I don't recall ever reading a single comment on an anthro forum stating that the distance between west Eurasians is very small, but take comfort bc I believe you. I guess other forums try desparately to get others to believe that group x is a completely different creature from group y so they can sever ties from ethnicities they don't like (south euros, jews , North Africans ,levantines, Caucasus groups and Arabs get hit the worst). I guess the pca is the secret weapon.

Seems that it takes a small part of the genome to break groups apart. I don't know exactly how I figured this out but its based on certain patterns I've picked up over the past two months starting from when I registered here. I guess you can probably separate Russians from the English and have them plot far from each other by focusing on small specific areas where they differ and ignoring the larger areas where they mesh (ie general patterns mostly seen in Northern Europeans).

Does anyone really have "Thor the Viking Lord as a handle"? :) I have to remember that one. If he does, does he watch the "Thor" Marvel Comics film over and over again? That movie had definite homo-erotic overtones as far as I'm concerned. Have you seen the fan art for Tom Hiddleston based on it? I saw him react to it on Graham Norton. I thought he'd crawl under the table. :) Anyway...

The PCAs over which these kind of people hover with a ruler are looking at European variation, or at the most, European and Middle Eastern variation. I know there are more recent versions available, but this one can get the idea across. When you look at European variation in terms of world wide variation, this is what you get...

http://2.bp.blogspot.com/-fnUVsGrwi...m0hSMUfm9wQ/s1600/Global_MDS_Average_C1C2.png

Now, imagine you have a microscope. You could zoom in and in and in and get a graphic of Europe that shows all the European populations spread out from one another. Is that more accurate? Well, if you want to find out how they related to each other, yes, but does that change how similar they are in the big scheme of things?

Look at what the British did with the POBI project. The people of the British Isles are very similar to one another, as the authors acknowledge. Being on islands helps cut down on migration, even if it doesn't stop it. They wanted to examine any variation that existed so they drilled way down. It doesn't change the fst distances of the areas to one another, but it helps with figuring out migrations.

That's what this was all supposed to be about: trying to figure out if farming arrived in Europe through cultural influences or the migration of people. Then the focus went to was there indeed a migration of people with the arrival of the Indo-European languages. It's the Davidskis and people of his ilk who are obsessed with separating northern and eastern Europeans from the rest of the world.

The reason the Europeans are all mushed together, and part of the Near East as well, is because the ancestral populations separated by the LGM came together and admixed. The Holocene changed everything.

That isn't to say that there aren't differences among Europeans, because there are, but all of this mania for separating them is racist in inspiration. There was a certain mythology that developed in the 19th and early 20th century, and certain people are desperate to maintain it. Maybe they don't have anything else of which to be proud. The problem is that the more we discover the more we understand how stupid it was.

Some of my favorite ironies in all of this is that the WHG, claimed to be the most "European" of the ancient populations because they were in Europe earlier than the farmers, are the "darkest" of our ancient ancestors, whether or not they pull people "north" on some PCA. They pull people "north" because that's where their centrum wound up. DUH! The EHG, the next favorite, didn't arrive much before the farmers, and in addition they have Han affinities. You can't make this stuff up.

What really drags people away from the European cluster is SSA or Han/Siberian type ancestry.
 
No I made that up. I'm not a fan of super hero movies but an extremely close friend of mine is a marvel and dc junkie who would catch every known marvel or dc movie or tv series known to mankind and he would flaunt all the "cool parts" about said films at my expense. When I was a kid, I read x men, Spider-Man, and batman comics...then I no longer cared.

You say many don't have much else of which to be proud...lol yeah. If you dropped out of school and have no talents, you would likely find yourself struggling for self verification . Its easy to find such verification by imagining one self as a member of a higher class of human responsible for making vast breakthroughs in science, philosophy, government, engineering, and the arts.

I rely on you and people like Alan and Kurd because I don't know who else to turn to when it comes to gaining an understanding of these subjects. It seems that so many other forums are devoted to twisting actual scientific studies around so they can convince others that (insert race here) is superior to all.
 
The more I think of the username " Thor the Viking lord" the funnier it gets. Could one get any cheaper when it comes to declaring a username? It's like using "Caesar the Roman Emperor", "King Arthur the English Lord", or "Leonidas the Spartan Warrior" as a username.
 
Here's some more accurate, imo, reconstructions of her, as they are at least based on contemporary representations:

hqdefault.jpg


It matches the contemporary coins much more:
20120218-cleo%20coin.jpg


Other coins are more forgiving of her nose.
tumblr_m7btftqEAT1qiu1coo1_500.jpg


This one is good, I think, as it's based on the coins, and it presents a very Greek looking woman.
maxresdefault.jpg

that look is very common among Sarakatsanoi, although they are towards red, and is found in upper Makedonia, Fyrom Thessaly till Phthia and Epirus,
that is the lokroi Makedonians style,
i do not want to post personal photos of people I know but is common,
also in areas east of laggadas and Sohos,
that is not a look af an Argeiad central Makedonia

PS
did they reconstruct the nose in purpose?
it is too big,
 

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