See stunning reconstruction of ancient Egyptian mummy that languished at an Australian high school for a century

An ancient Egyptian mummified head displayed in a school library in Australia now has a fresh face, thanks to a meticulous scientific reconstruction.  

The ancient object is something of a mystery — it's unclear how it arrived at Grafton High School in northern New South Wales, about 300 miles (480 kilometers) north of Sydney, and a century-old note with it only said it was from a "genuine" Egyptian mummy. But it will now be displayed beside 3D-printed sculptures based on medical scans and forensic techniques, to show the reconstruction process and what the person would have looked like when they were alive.

"It takes the emphasis off the human remains," Jennifer Mann, the forensic sculptor who created the reconstruction, told Live Science. "And that's very important, because museums are more and more reluctant to display the remains of ancient people."

Mann works for the Victorian Institute of Forensic Medicine (VFIM) in Melbourne and has sculpted faces for several historical figures, including the reconstruction in 2016 of Meritamun, an ancient Egyptian woman whose mummified head was in the University of Melbourne's anatomy and pathology museum. (Some queens of Egypt had the same name.)

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For this latest reconstruction, researchers scanned the ancient skull with computed tomography (CT) to create a digital model of the skull, which was then 3D printed in polymer resin so Mann could create a realistic reconstruction.

The scans and analysis by universities in Australia and Italy showed that the head had come from a woman who was between 50 and 60 years old when she died. Flecks of gold attached to the mummified head indicated that she had lived during the Greco-Roman period in Egypt (332 B.C. to A.D. 395), when gold leaf was used in the mummification process. The final sculpture is a lifelike portrayal of an older Egyptian woman with her hair in a Greek style that was popular at the time.