King Tut held the throne until his death around 1323 BC, ten years after he was about 9 years old. It is of special archaeological interest not only because of its world-famous burial treasures, but also because it reigned for ten years at an important stage in Egyptian history.

What did Tutankhamun look like?

Tut’s father, the revolutionary pharaoh Akhenaten, forbade worship of all gods except the sun disc Aten. However, Tutankhamun did not follow his father’s footsteps. After his father’s new cult failed and plunged the Nile country into chaos, his reign saw a return to the old gods.

The performed forensic reconstruction of the face helps to form an opinion about the appearance of the young king. An international team of researchers used existing CT (computed tomography) scans of the mummy’s entire skull to create a three-dimensional model. They also cited X-rays and skull measurements taken by archaeologists.

In previous studies, it was stated that Tutankhamun’s skull was slightly longer than normal. A new study found more evidence for this conclusion: when examining the data, it was observed that: It had not only a unique head shape, but also an extremely large brain volume., especially when compared to the skulls of corpses whose scans were found in the study’s database. The brain volume of the average human is about 1,234 cubic centimeters, while the brain volume of the pharaoh is 1,432 cubic centimeters.

One of the stages of Tutankhamun’s face reconstruction / Photograph by Cícero Moraes

An artistic depiction of what the ancient Egyptian pharaoh Tutankhamun looked like / Photo by Cícero Moraes

The skull has a special shape. In our study, measurements showed a correlation with exposed skulls. [зміни форми черепа], but this does not seem to be the case for Tutankhamun. Although it has a special, elongated shape, everything indicates that it is a natural skull.
– said research participant Cicero Moraes, a Brazilian graphics expert.

Moraes says the skull’s structure is different from those of other Egyptian mummies found in the database.

The researchers created two approximations of the face. The first was an “objective” grayscale image of the pharaoh with his eyes closed in a neutral pose. The second, painted version, presenting “elements for complete humanisation,” depicts a young man with his head shaved and dark skin, eyes down, as was customary at the time.