‘Peering into the eyes of the past’: reconstruction reveals face of woman who lived before Trojan war
Digital technology reveals ‘incredibly modern’ royal who lived 3,500 years ago in kingdom associated with Helen of Troy
She lived around 3,500 years ago – but facial reconstruction technology has brought a woman from late bronze age Mycenae back to life.
The woman was in her mid-30s when she was buried in a royal cemetery between the 16th and 17th centuries BC. The site was uncovered in the 1950s on the Greek mainland at Mycenae, the legendary seat of Homer’s King Agamemnon.
Dr Emily Hauser, the historian who commissioned the digital reconstruction, told the Observer: “She’s incredibly modern. She took my breath away.
For the first time, we are looking into the face of a woman from a kingdom associated with Helen of Troy – Helen’s sister, Clytemnestra, was queen of Mycenae in legend – and from where the poet Homer imagined the Greeks of the Trojan war setting out. Such digital reconstructions persuade us that these were real people.
This woman died around the beginning of the late bronze age, several hundred years before the supposed date of the Trojan war.”
A digital artist, Juanjo Ortega G., has developed the lifelike face from a clay reconstruction of the same woman that was made in the 1980s by Manchester University, pioneers of one of the major methods in facial reconstruction.
Hauser, whose book Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women Written Out of It will be published next week, said that technical developments in forensic anthropology and DNA analysis, as well as radiocarbon dating and 3D digital printing, have led to dramatic improvements in reconstructions of the ancient world.
“We can – for the first time – peer back into the eyes of the past.”
The woman had been buried with an electrum face mask and a warrior kit of weapons – including three swords that were assumed to be associated with the man buried next to her, but are now thought to have belonged to her.
Hauser said: “The traditional story is that, if you have a woman next to a man, she must be his wife.” Facial similarities had previously been noted, but DNA has confirmed that these were brother and sister rather than husband and wife.
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We're all used to reality inversion, buck breaking, demoralisation propaganda etc. Vikings were Black, Blacks built Stonehenge, Egyptians were Black. Ancient Swedes were Black etc. Whereas the reality is light-haired, light-eyed 'Nordic' people used to have a much wider range than they do now, started probably every civilisation, then mongrelised and degenerated into the swarthy, low-quality populations we see today in Italy, Greece, Egypt etc., or just straight Nonwhite people like in India, Peru and so on. This is all documented, although they have made it kind of awkward to find, we have old mosaics, paintings, physical descriptions, busts, mummies etc.
So this was like lightning from a clear sky for me. Academics telling the truth? The pendulum really is swinging back the other way, a little bit, here and there. Although the moulding was done in the 80s, if they did it now she would probably look like Serena Williams or something. Still they're trying to imply she was a warrior, they had to shoehorn that angle in.
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