5/11/2005: King Tut revealed

Who is that handsome young man? via Boing Boing, it's King Tut! They did CT scans of his mummy and reproduced the gent --

Nice pic... here's what he looked like based on a sculpture from his tomb:

http://62.18.33.91/fotoweb/Preview.f...BC9638B08C635D

And art from the Amarna era showed his family with similar enlogated heads

http://ist-socrates.berkeley.edu/~ma...aten_stela.htm

(Akhenaten was Tut's father, or brother, or half-brother, depending on which theory you buy.) There has been much controversy over how much the bizarre art style of this period reflected reality and how much it was a result of Akhenaten's general peculiarty.

is it just me or are the eyes on the first shot a little freaky?

anyone else see a resemblance to Barbara Steisand in the first one?? wow.

Well . . .they still yanked his brains out through his nose with a hook on a stick.

He looks kind of pretty. Or is it just Middle-eastern/north african features??

But wow, how did they reconstruct him? I always think this is like some kind of magic. I mean, taking a skull and making a face of it?

This cracks me up. I was watching a special on how they do this stuff on discovery channel, and they take lots of measurements of modern people from the same geographic area and then average it, and then apply the evidence of peculiarities, and then make the rest up.

It's like when they try to recreate dinosaurs. We don't know if they had green scales, brown scales, grey scales, a combination, or what, but yet museums say "This is what they looked like."

Riiiight. Actually, this is what your artists THINK they looked like. They *could* have been purple with pink polkadots. We don't have a CLUE. They just assume that modern reptiles look like dinosaurs did, and apply that color scheme. Sheesh. That's not science, folks. That's art.

I think that you wouldn't have to look hard in a museum for the notice that the color of the dinosaur is conjecture. Recently, this fact is even more prominent, with artists' renditions of dinosaurs being given more and more garish and exciting coloring.

I wonder if the strange head shape came from molding the head as a baby. That sort of thing was practiced in some cultures (at least I remember mention of this in my anthro class many years ago).

The shape of a baby's head is pretty maleable so be careful what silly hats you dress yours up in.

In this case I think you also have to consider that there are probably a few hundred depictions of Tut from his tomb. Even given that there are questions about how realistic representations of the royal family of this period are, that's got to have some influence on the reconstuctors--I've got to think any ambiguity or "close call" in the data would be consciously or unconsciously resolved in favor of giving him a look similar to that of the known statuary and paintings. (Unless you just found somebody who had never ever seen any pictures of anything from the tomb.)

I was also thinking of the same thing, that perhaps that shape was considered pleasing at the time..

J Lo?? Not in a million...

It's certainly not unheard-of for ruling families to have anatomical abnormalities. Consider the "Hapsburg chin", for instance.

But what's with the eye makeup and lack of facial hair? Tutenkhamen was young, but not too young to shave, and I never heard he was into drag...

(OK, OK, I know the makeup probably reflects practices of the time. But what about the facial hair?)

Is that dot on his ear supposed to be a mole? How in the hell are they getting information to indicate that?

The eye makeup was common at the time, especially for royals.

By modern standards, most ancient males were in drag.

All of us had a classmate in grammar school who had a "baseball head". At my age, none had makeup though.
...Tut into drag?.......hmmmmm....
This cat looks like a full blown homosexual to me........sorry.

I think that's an earring hole. They have the jewelry to scale it.
So Tut was a drag queen doing Streisand? Cool.

Disco Tut.

*choke* *sputter* *guffaw*

Oh well, the monitor needed cleaning anyway.

We get kind of jaded about technology because it's friggin everywhere now, but think about this.... You could be looking at the actual face of King Tut. I mean, that's the first time anyone's seen that guy in a bajillion years. Cool.

Didn't they find some dinosaur's soft tissue preserved somewhere recently? Crichton has never been that far off with his stuff. Despite the mass-market approach, he can come across as downright prophetic at times.

If you live nearby to one of the stops or can travel, you have a rare opportunity to see some of the stuff from the tomb.

Screw that, I stood in that goddamn line over 12 hours and then had to break into the garage to get the car back. :p

I think the reason that they did the eye makeup was to imitate cats' eyes. The cat was sacred and worshipped as a diety. It was punishable by death to take a cat out of Egypt, they mummified them, families shaved their eyebrows in mourning when a pet cat died, and there were cat graveyards in the city of Bubastis (Bast being the Cat Goddess).

OMG!! it's true Tut and Babs could be sibbies!! lol

hey, welcome bluRhonda. What's a historic restoration contractor do?

ha! apparently Tut had huge buck teeth! yuk yuk!
there was a whole National Geographic article on this