Born in 1342 BC under the name of Tutankhaton (‘the living image of Aten’), he went down in history as Tutankhamun after succeeding Pharaoh Akhenaten, his probable father, when he was only nine years old. His reign barely lasted a decade during the Eighteenth Dynasty.
He died young, in 1325 BC, after marrying his half-sister Ankhesenamun, and without issue. Experts believe that the couple produced two fetuses that were stillborn, one at 5/6 months and the other at nine months. Both were mummified and included in the tomb of Tutankhamen, the same one found intact by the British Egyptologist Howard Carter in 1922 in the Valley of the Kings.
The fascination that this pharaoh has aroused since then has been extraordinary. The mysterious circumstances surrounding his untimely death and, above all, the strange events when his tomb was discovered (including a possible curse) helped fuel the myth. Already in 2010, a study based on the DNA of some pharaohs discovered that Tutankhamen suffered from malaria and Köhler’s disease, a necrosis that affects the scaphoid bone of the foot.
Another of the elements that has caused a capital attraction towards her figure has been to be able to detail what her appearance was. As early as 1983, forensic artist Betty Pat Gatliff reconstructed the pharaoh’s face from a plaster skull molded from X-rays. And in 2005 the renowned archaeologist Zahi Hawass presented to the world up to three different revisions.
In the year 2022, CT scans were used for sculptor Christian Corbet to make his version of Tutankhamen’s face. Now, scientists from Australia, Italy and Brazil have digitally rendered the king’s face for the first time, creating their own facial approximation.
“Tutankhamen is of interest not just because of his world-famous burial treasure, but because he ruled for a decade at an important phase in Egyptian history,” says Michael Habicht, a researcher at Australia’s Flinders University. During his reign, for example, they returned to the worship of the old gods after the path Akhenaten bet on failed and plunged the land of the Nile into chaos.
The researchers had to overcome great difficulties, such as access to his skull. They got around this problem by digitally scanning another one and then adjusting it to the available measurements. They were then able to shape her facial features, including the size of her lips, the position of her eyes, and the shape of her nose.
The work, in which the well-known Brazilian designer CÃÂcero Moraes has participated, has recently been published in the Italian Journal of Anatomy and Embryology. The reconstructed face remarkably resembles a sculpture of Tutankhamen as a child that was unearthed in his tomb, Habicht explains.
The image obtained is that of a young man “with a delicate face,” says Cicero Moraes. “Looking at him, we see more of a young student than a politician full of responsibilities, which makes the historical figure even more interesting,” he said in a statement.
While studying the data, the researchers noticed that the head had a unique shape and an extremely large brain volume. While the average man has a brain volume of approximately 1,234 cubic centimeters, that of the young pharaoh was as large as 1,432 cubic centimeters.
The specialists created two facial approximations. The first was a grayscale “objective” image that featured the pharaoh with his eyes closed in a neutral position. The second, a colorized version showing a young man with a shaved head and dark skin tone wearing eyeliner, as was the fashion at the time.
