Wednesday, February 13, 2013

Modern Science Unravels Ancient Mummy Mysteries | Essentials

Modern Science Unravels Ancient Mummy Mysteries

Egyptian Sarcophagus & Mummy, The British Museum, Bloomsbury, London
Egyptian Sarcophagus & Mummy, The British Museum, Bloomsbury, London by nikoretro
License (according to Flickr): Attribution-ShareAlike License
Excerpt:

New York analysts have secondhanded modern-day forensic science to disclose the faces of 4 ancient mummies from the 1st century A.D.
"It was pretty exciting," stated Bob Brier, an Egyptologist at Long Island University and lead author of a new research published in the diary ZÄS. "We didn't know what we were going to find.". Brier and colleagues secondhanded a CT scanner to produce physical designs of the mummies' skulls. Then a crime artist, who just knew the mummy's age and gender, secondhanded the designs to recreate the mummies' faces. The painstaking process took seven days per mummy. "We were dying to see what it looked like," Brier stated. The team then compared the faces to painted portraits entombed with the bandaged bodies. Two of the 4 match-ups were noticeably comparable.

People:

Bob Brier

Overall Sentiment: 0.122692

Relevance: 0.904705

SentimentQuote
0.39818“It was pretty exciting,” said Bob Brier, ...
0.148037“It was pretty exciting,” said Bob Brier, an Egyptologist at Long Island University and lead author of a new study published in the journal ZÄS.  “We  didn’t  know what we were going to find.”
-0.0448648“We were dying to see what it looked like,” Brier said. ...
-0.0839053“It is believed that they were almost certainly painted during the lifetimes of the individuals and clearly were not idealized images,” Brier said ...
0.0149369“It is possible that during the mummification procedure, when several bodies were being mummified at the same time, a mismatch occurred,” Brier said. ...
0.317651“other facial features and proportions were so consistent between the reconstruction and portrait that no mix-up was indicated here,” Brier said. ...
0.380367“This study convinced us that some of these portraits were dead-on,” Brier said, ...
-0.0587485“The difficulty is finding portraits that are still bound to the mummy,” he said. ...
-0.0289163“The difficulty is finding portraits that are still bound to the mummy,” he said. “Many portraits were taken off the mummies and sold during the 19th century and early part of the 20th century.”
Sentiment Stats:
  • Number of Quotes: 9
  • Aggregate Sentiment: 1.042737
  • Mean: 0.11585966666667
  • Standard Deviation: 1.7320508075689

Caroline Wilkinson/University

Overall Sentiment: 0.0975611

Relevance: 0.465962

Salima Ikram

Overall Sentiment: 0.244741

Relevance: 0.208069

SentimentQuote
0.18817“This is a very sound manner of testing the hypothesis that the mummy portraits were made when the individual was alive,” said Salima Ikram, ...
0.112473“This is a very sound manner of testing the hypothesis that the mummy portraits were made when the individual was alive,” said Salima Ikram, a professor of Egyptology at the American University in Cairo, who was not involved with the study. “It enhances our understanding of the concept of portraiture and its importance at this time.”
Sentiment Stats:
  • Number of Quotes: 2
  • Aggregate Sentiment: 0.300643
  • Mean: 0.1503215
  • Standard Deviation: 1.7320508075689

Key:

  • Aggregate Sentiment is meant to be an indicator of an individual's overall sentiment.
  • The Mean is meant to be an indicator of an individual's average comment sentiment.
  • The Standard Deviation, when there are enough quotes, will indicate an individual's consistency of sentiment (i.e. a Standard Deviation of 0 would mean they were very consistent in their sentiment and 1 would mean they were very inconsistent).

Note that quote stats are likely to be meaningless beyond the aggregate score due to the tiny sample size. However, they are always provided just in case you find something useful there.

Additional Info:

Organization: Dundee Centre for Anatomy & Human Identification

Overall Sentiment: 0.0800737

Relevance: 0.621617

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