ref.: October 8, "The 'Elder Lady' and Queen Tiye"
In doing an artistic reconstruction of the face of the mummy known as "The Elder Lady", my method was the usual one of taking a large photo of the head from Elliot Smith's "The Royal Mummies" and covering it with a sheet of fairly transparent paper. I faithfully traced the lady's basic profile from hairline to throat but restored the tilt of the nose to what it must have been before the pressure of the bandages flattened it somewhat (not much in this instance). The tracing is necessary because, like reconstructors who mold a likeness over a skull with clay, I have to have a basic model to go by. The head of a mummy is basically just a skull, anyway, covered with leathery skin as nearly all the fatty tissue that might have existed in the face has dissipated.
If the mummy is identified and I am satisfied with the ID, I restore the features with help from those ancient portraits of the person that appear to me to be the most realistic. However, the face of the "Elder Lady" is so excellently preserved (even though I don't like the angles of the two photos available of her and find them difficult to work with because they are neither a true profile shot nor a true head-on) that one doesn't need such likenesses to understand what was originally there. The lips are among the best-preserved I have ever seen on an Egyptian mummy and suggest a unique shape. Unfortunately, mummies do not have eyeballs, at least not real ones. Also, their eye-sockets tend to be sunken, so here is perhaps the only area of the reconstruction where I need to use some imagination.
Since I really do think this mummy is Queen Tiye, I decided to give her the slightly "exophthalmic" look suggested by the little wooden head attributed to the queen, even though I think that this portrait, in some ways, is quite in disagreement with what I see in the mummy's features and other ancient portraits of the queen are more similar to one another than they are to this boxwood head.
However, rather than go on about my own impressions at any length, I leave it to the rest of you to decide for yourselves whether my reconstruction would suggest to you that this could be the wife of Amenhotep III.
I must apologize for the fact that the scan of the drawing is not a good one and the colors are also distorted. I did not give the lady "rose-colored lips" but something much more natural.
Finally, I will say that Queen Tiye does seem to me to have been a very small lady. If you look at Jones' drawing of the golden shrine from KV55 (page 215 of Romer's "Valley of the Kings"), she is strikingly diminutive in comparison with Akhenaten, much more so than Nefertiti usually is. The mummy, the "Elder Lady", measures only 1.455 metres -- under five feet in height. Actually, this was fortuitous, as the putative mummy of Amenhotep III measures only 5' 2".
Marianne Luban
UrHekau@aol.com
