The Face of the Younger Lady Mummy KV35 (Digital Photoshop Reconstruction)

Описание: Project requested by YT users: 林松霖 + Heky Semhel

This mysterious mummy was found unmarked and was thought at one point to be the body of Queen Nefertiti (genetic sequencing ruled that out as the mummy was found to be too young [25-35 years of age] and that she was linked by blood to Amenhotep III, Tiye, Akhenaten, and King Tutankhamun, placing her squarely in the role of Amenhotep and Tiye’s daughter, Akhenaten’s sister, and Tutankhamun’s MOTHER). The mummy of Queen Nefertiti is yet to be found.

What was thought to be facial damage done to the mummy by tomb robbers long after her burial has been proven by CAT scan technology to actually have been the most likely cause of her death. There were signs of attempts to repair her face by the embalmers by cleaning out bone fragments and packing her cheek with linen to "rebuild" the damage which had broken her left jaw and teeth inward from some severe external force like an animal kick or, unfortunately, possibly a heavy weapon. Other bone breaks were seen but not addressed by wrapping or the placing of healing amulets by embalmers, suggesting that those injuries were caused by poor handling long after death.

ARTIST NOTES: The difficult thing about the broken out part of the Younger Lady mummy’s face is that is was very difficult to determine if the jaw was open or closed. A French sculptor had decided with experts that her jaw was open and therefore created a reconstruction to counteract that, which to be honest created a very strange looking weak jawline and bass-like mouth. It’s all guesswork, to be fair, and I can’t claim any greater authenticity than the next artist.

As of 2016, CT scans were available of the Younger Lady mummy which could see much deeper into the facial structures. Knowing that many of her teeth were broken off on the left side, I tried to see how far apart the intact teeth were on the unaffected side. It wasn’t easy, and at best I surmised that the jaw was slightly open, but not so much to make a huge adjustment to the jaw line. Knowing now that her face was egregiously injured BEFORE death, the distortion around her mouth could have been the latent result of swelling and/or (eeek!) shredding of the tissues. I opted to use the remaining bone and teeth structures to give me hints about lip and mouth shape. She may have had a slight overbite but nothing that would detract from her appearance. The embalmers had used packing and fillers around her eyes to keep them from sinking, which hinted to me that she may have had "hooded" eyelids as there is a very smooth line from her brows to her eyes with very little definition in between. The mummy’s head had been shaved, and the character of her eyebrows is a bit of a mystery. I made my best guess by following the orbital/brow bone lines to get the general shape of standard brows, if she had them.


Regarding the ever-present argument about the purity of "skin color". Egypt is not on the equator. It is just above the Tropic of Cancer which is a level shared by parts of Mexico, India, Saudi Arabia, and Burma (Myanmar) and the "toasted" skin color of those cultures predominates those areas. The Eurasian structure of the Younger Lady mummy’s skull supports that she is descended from people who lived on the Cancerian side of the equator, rather than the darker-skinned Somalian/Ugandan people of the Equator proper.

Opening Image: TheYoungerLady-61072-FrontView-PlateXCIX-TheRoyalMummies-1912
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons
License US-PD

Secondary Image: Based on CT Scan of Younger Lady KV35 from publication "Scanning the Pharaohs" by AUC Press (c) 2016 Authored by Zahi Hawass and Sahar N.Saleem

"Younger Lady KV35" 2024. Original Digital Art (c) M.A. Ludwig

Music "Akhenaten" 2010 (c)M.A. Ludwig

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