"Beauty of the Nile" May Have Had Ancient Makeover

Reuters ^ | Tue Mar 31, 2009

[nickcarraway]

An ancient Egyptian queen regarded as the Mona Lisa of the ancient world may not have been such a looker after all, German scientists said on Tuesday.

A delicately carved face in the limestone core of the famous bust of Nefertiti suggests the royal sculptor at the time may have smoothed creases around the mouth and fixed a bumpy nose to depict the "Beauty of the Nile" in a better light.

The bust of Nefertiti was found in Egypt in 1912 at Tell el-Amarna, the short-lived capital of Nefertiti's husband, the Pharaoh Akhenaten. It is now housed in Berlin's Altes Museum.

"It is possible that the bust of Nefertiti was commissioned (probably by Akhenaten himself) to represent Nefertiti according to his personal perception," Alexander Huppertz, director of the Imaging Science Institute in Berlin, and colleagues reported in the journal Radiology.

The 50 cm (20-inch) bust, discovered by German archeologist Ludwig Borchardt during excavation of the studio of the famous royal sculptor Thutmose, consists of a limestone core covered in layers of stucco of varying thickness.

Researchers first analyzed the bust using CT technology in 1992 but advances in technology allowed Huppertz and colleagues to delve deeper into the sculpture.

[piasa]

Speaking of which, a lot of that seems to stem from the 1930s and 40s in the US, when the writings of a Briton, Gerald Massey, became popular. He was a writer heavily invested in linking everything he could to Egypt, that originally God was female, and atheists and Wiccans today like to cite his claims that Judaism and Christianity evolved from Egypt and that Jesus was just a copy of Horace.