Computer experts in US technology mecca Silicon Valley have used 21st century science to virtually revive a two-century-old Egyptian mummy, researchers confirmed on August 04.
Technicians at computing visualisation company Silicon Graphics Incorporated used body scan data to create three-dimensional imagery of a mummified girl kept at Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose since about 1930.
"This mummy is no longer just a fascinating artefact, but a lively young child who lived many ages ago," said museum curator Lisa Schwappach-Shirriff.
"The images of this little girl are breathtaking, and the details that we can see on her are nothing short of amazing."
Museum workers to dubbed the girl mummy "Sherit," which they said is ancient Egyptian for "little one."
Sherit was close to five years old when she died, and the absence of signs of injury suggests she succumbed to dysentery or another illness common among children in Nile Valley at the time, researchers said.
To peer inside Sherit's linen cocoon without disturbing it, radiologists at Stanford University's School of Medicine south of San Francisco used sophisticated equipment to scan the girl's remains.
The scans mined 35 times more information than those done on the famed King Tutankhamen mummy and enabled imaging experts to picture her in three dimensions, researchers said.
"Any time you can view anatomical data in three dimensions, you'll have a much more accurate picture of the subject," said Paul Brown a dentist with the Stanford-NASA National Biocomputation Center.
Brown and a team of fellow dentists, orthodontists and oral surgeons determined the mummy's age and other features by studying computer imaging.
"She had kind of a cute smile, it looks like,' said dentist Eric Herbranson. "If this child was born today, with the level of privilege she had, she would be wearing braces at 12."
She was an active lass with a receding jaw line and, had she survived to Tutankhamen's age of 19, she would have resembled him, concluded Stephen Schendel, a professor of surgery at Stanford.
Schendel, whose hobby is sculpting, headed the moulding of a bust of Sherit to go with the museum exhibit, the curator said.
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