my mother’s head

The ancient object is a bit mysterious; It is unclear how he got to Grafton High School in northern New South Wales, about 480 kilometers north of Sydney. The century-old note only stated that it came from a “real” Egyptian mummy.

The head will now be displayed alongside 3D-printed sculptures created with medical scans and forensic techniques to show the reconstruction process and what the person looked like during their lifetime.

This eliminates the significance of human remains. This is very important because museums are increasingly reluctant to display the remains of ancient people.
says Jennifer Mann, the forensic sculptor who created the reconstruction.

Mann works at the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VFIM) in Melbourne and has already sculpted the faces of many historical figures, including the 2016 reconstruction of Meritamun, an ancient Egyptian woman whose mummified head is housed in the University of Melbourne’s Museum of Anatomy and Pathology . .

For this latest reconstruction, researchers scanned the ancient skull with computed tomography (CT) scans to create a digital model of the skull; This was then printed on a 3D printer with polymer resin so Mann could coat the layers of artificial muscle and skin. realistic reconstruction.

Head CT scan at Siemens Medical Systems Australia / Photo: Nick Parmeter

• After obtaining a 3D-printed skull, Mann added eyes and tissue depth markers based on ultrasound measurements of living Egyptians today.
• He then created the musculature around the markers and used formulas to predict soft tissue properties that could be determined from skull measurements. The nose, for example, was reconstructed based on the angles of the bones around the nasal opening in the skull and careful measurements of the opening.

3D print of a skull with tissue depth markings / Photo: Jennifer Mann

One of the stages of making a sculpture / Photo: Jennifer Mann

• Because the mouth of this skull was severely damaged, Mann consulted a dental forensic dentist to determine its structure.
• The next step was to create the skin around the eyes and over the muscles.
• Mann then completed the reconstruction with a hairstyle and earrings from Egypt’s Greco-Roman period, based on mummy portraits from the Fayum.
• The final sculpture was coated in bronze-colored resin. Mann says that people of Egyptian, Greek, Roman and other ancestry lived in Egypt at that time, which conveyed skin tone better.

The finished sculpture depicts a woman in her 50s and 60s who was mummified during Egypt’s Greco-Roman period / Photo: Jennifer Mann

Finished sculpture / Photo: Jennifer Mann

Scans and analyzes carried out by universities in Australia and Italy revealed that the head belonged to him. a woman who was between 50 and 60 years old at the time of her death. Gold flecks clinging to the mummified head indicate that it lived during the Greco-Roman period in Egypt (332 BC – AD 395), when gold leaf was used in the mummification process.

The final statue is a realistic representation of an elderly Egyptian woman with the Greek-style hairstyle popular at the time.

mysterious mummy

There was a mummified head Introduced to the school in 1915 either by a local doctor who acquired it while a medical student in Scotland, or by a local resident who was a world-renowned Egyptologist.

The school had previously used the head as a teaching tool, but when it tried to send the object back to Egypt or donate it to a museum in Sydney it was reportedly rejected.

There is a hole of unknown origin in the left temple of the skull / Photo: Siemens Medical Systems Australia

News of the mysterious mummy gained widespread publicity last year when he appeared on the ABC’s Stuff The Brits Stolen podcast, which featured a CT scan and facial reconstruction.