Face reality

One of 17,000 web-based phenomena currently in vogue is computer reconstructions of the faces of historical figures. No longer do folks have to stare at an alabaster statue or a medieval painting to guess what Nero or Richard the Lionhearted looked like. Experts™ now harness computer software, employ often-unstated assumptions, combine the two, piddle on Instagram while the magic quickens, and then spit out three-dimensionally rendered busts of just about anyone who's mentioned in antique texts.

The latest is Amenhotep III, a 14th century B.C. all-pro Egyptian pharaoh who not only oversaw a flourishing era in the state's New Kingdom but was the father of religious radical Akhenaten and the grandfather of King Tut.

The rendering's verisimilitude falls somewhere between a computer animated Disney character and an heirloom color photograph. Our boy appears stocky, somewhat bewildered, and altogether less regal than you'd imagine - something of a disappointment given his outsized reputation and leagues apart from the highly stylized imagery of Egyptian royal art, where every pharaoh looks like a clone of the last.* (Amenhotep here looks more late-period Dick Shawn than 1950s Yul Brynner.)

But it's a try, and for all I or anyone else know is a decent one.

And that's the thing. That these images are unfalsifiable is too obvious to contemplate at length, but it's worth noting the garbage-in, garbage-out basis from which they come. The garbage-in for Amenhotep is pretty high-quality rubbish: his remains, which were lifted from the Valley of Kings, where most New Kingdom pharaohs were interred. (Alas, most of their treasures were robbed, usually after burial, which is why King Tutankhamun's tomb is such a wonder.) I would guess there are differing opinions over what can be extrapolated from even a well-preserved corpse, but a corpse is the best start a reconstruction could have.

As for the bulk of these renderings the material is second hand: statues, paintings, coins, plus whatever clues can be gleaned from literary sources. It's quite the journey to get from a centuries-old representation by an artist - one who often had never seen the subject in question and who was laboring under stylistic considerations we may not understand completely - to the mostly lifelike images produced by, say, Daniel Voshart.

The results can be rangy!

Behold Cleopatra. At top is a more traditional rendering of the woman who ensnared both Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, prompting speculation that a necessary, if not sufficient, condition for founding the Roman Empire was to not sleep with Cleopatra. This number conforms with Plutarch's unflattering description of Ptolemaic ruler - prominent nose, among other qualities - written centuries later, though Egyptian coins of the period didn't do her any favors. (Caesar and Antony weren't sleeping with her just because they liked her; Egypt was a place of incalculable wealth, grain in particular, the kind of grain to put in Roman mouths to keep them from stirring up trouble.)

At bottom we find not so much the product of three centuries of Greek inbreeding - the Ptolemies, the descendants of one of Alexander the Great's generals, ruled Egypt until Rome muscled in - as the student body vice president and head cheerleader at Herbert Hoover High in Cedar Rapids. Button cute, this Cleopatra! Anyone could see why Mark Antony wouldn't care if she had two modii of millet to rub together. He was coming in hot!

So what are people to do with this? As long as they know what's behind these representations, I find the objections, however sensible they may be, arid. I suppose I line up with the 11th grade history teacher at Herbert Hoover High's approach: who cares about niggling, unknowable details long as it gets the kIdZ, or any other person, interested. It's hard to argue with that in utilitarian terms, particularly since classicists currently are going out of their way to leech their field of anything that would be of any interest to any normal human being, an odd diversion from the practice of discerning universal lessons from ancient history. One of the many virtues of studying ancient history is it gets you out of your own ass. If it takes a cheerleader to do that, all I can say is, "rah-rah!"

*It's remarkable how little change you see over two-thousand years of Egyptian art. It's as if sometime in the 28th century they had a Eureka moment and concluded, "that's it. We've got it right!"