King Tut: It Ain't All Black and White

I just got a letter from an activist group I belong to. There's a big stink in parts of the African American community about the reconstruction of the face of King Tut. Egypt was apparently conquered by the Nubians, and King Tut, whose reign was well after that, should have had African features, they claim. The image made popular today, of course, is the one at the top of this blog entry.

According to National Geographic, 3 separate groups were allowed to create forensic recreations of the face of Tut, on their own with no other involvement with eath other. All 3 arrived at similar conclusions and looks. Some dispute this, and say they look nothing alike. While there are some variations in the soft tissue, the bone structure is the same, the chin and protruding teeth are the same. They look like they could be "brothers", so to speak.

Upon viewing the finished reconstructed face above, other than the subjective artistic assumptions made about skin and eye color (which they only guessed at), this face doesn't necessarily look purely Caucasion. I am no forensics expert. But as an artist who uses faces realistically quite a bit in her work, I study faces all the time. The features look mixed, certainly not pure Caucasion by any stretch of the matter. I'm Irish and Swedish, I should know! It's not a far-fetched assumption to believe King Tut was of mixed blood and carried traits from both African and other sources.

Along with the pervasive incest involved in preserving the blood of Egyptian royalty, Nubian as well as Egyptian and Libyan blood all percolated in the mix, and probably Caucasoid blood as well at some point. It would be impossible to determine with any certainty what soft facial features King Tut may have had above his bone structure according to whatever race was his background. We can only theorize.

It's also fair to say that the peoples of the African race don't necessarily have the same, generic features across the board. Nubians were believed to have slim, aquiline noses. Some had varying degrees of pigment in the skin. King Tut has Nubian blood.

Forensics is a science, albeit an inexact one. People who dispute the current faces of King Tut claim he looks nothing like the old paintings and statues of him. If one were to go according to that, there would be an entire race of 200 ft. high Egyptians who only walked sideways. To claim that forensic art based in science is more dubious than icon art from an ancient race who were producing these paintings as a way to glorify and exaggerate their royalty is an abusrd leap of illogic. It's obvious that the Egyptians were not in it for the photorealism.

While I can understand the frustration within some in the African community who have fought to overturn the outdated premise that the ancient Egyptians were Caucasian or Asian even, the current emotional outburst is knee-jerk. There's as much evidence for mixed races in Egypt at that time as there is for a strong African contingent. It wouldn't have been fair for the current forensic experts to portray King Tut as a stereotypical African because the evidence was just not there. So they settled for something somewhere in the middle, and even then, any rational person knows that even science changes in the light of new evidence.

Who knows what he'll look like 10 years from now.