Exhibit offers portraits of mummified ancient Egyptians

Associated Press

BALTIMORE

A team of researchers is giving the world a chance to see the faces of two Egyptian women who walked the earth about 2,300 years ago.

The Baltimore Sun reported that detailed portraits based on mummified remains form the core of “Who Am I? Remembering the Dead Through Facial Reconstruction,” the newest exhibition on display at the Johns Hopkins University Museum of Archaeology at least until the end of next year.

Experts in fields ranging from fine art, osteology, computer tomology and craniofacial reconstruction worked together to create the likenesses from two mummies acquired abroad and brought to Baltimore more than a century ago.

Sanchita Balachandran, the museum’s associate director, sees the exhibit as an opportunity to say, “These people have been with us since the 1880s, and we’re only now able to see them as real people.”

Balachandran’s team, a group that included graduate student Meg Swaney and six undergraduates, worked with Caroline Wilkinson, the director of Face Lab, a research group at Liverpool John Moores University in England that carries out forensic and archaeological research. Dr. Elliot K. Fishman, a professor of radiology and the director of diagnostic imaging at Johns Hopkins Hospital, performed a CT scan on the bodies, and those images provided information for 3D representations.