My disagreement is with calling a reconstruction by people living thousands of years later "evidence", when they aren't. King Tut's face mask, may or may not be idealistic, but that is evidence. Those artworks done while he was alive may or may not been idealistic, but they are true evidence and they all had a similar look to them, enough for the features of Tut to be recognizable in any anonymous gallery of Egyptian art. None of the reconstructions are the least bit similar. You and I don't know how idealistic or realistic it is because neither of us saw the boy in life. For anyone to say that they would need more than what current technology can provide, which is a time machine. Reconstructions are not on the same level of evidence and don't come anywhere near enough to be considered as more substantial "evidence" than the face mask or other art done of the boy king while alive.
I agree that idealized portraits were the norm and that AE art was anything but realistic. However, to take a face mask which would most likely been a very close likeness of the Boy King and treat it as oh so much irrelevant trash that just happens to be pretty and then putting some modern artwork together as somehow more definitive is absurdly ridiculous. At the end of the day it is mere speculation and modern opinions and speculation in the form of reconstructions are not more definitive than those artworks done during the time of the AEs themselves.
However, idealized or not, why is a reconstruction necessary? Even a reconstruction is idealized based on mathematical and statistical data sets. Idealized does not mean inaccurate. Portraits of George Washington did not show his warts and wrinkles, yet that doesn't mean that they aren't accurate. Greek and Roman art was idealized but yet there is no one running around trying to do reconstructions of Alexander the Great, because the artwork was idealized.
No. Reconstructions don't provide us any better of an understanding of how tut looked in life and certainly are not more accurate in any sense of the term than the mummy mask. The fact that 3 teams came up with 3 different views of the boy kind from the same 1 skull shows that reconstructions are not accurate and are highly subject to interperetation. That is the biggest fact and underlying point that these reconstructions point out and undermines any and all attempts to suggest they are some sort of definitive proof of how he looked. And that is only the latest set of reconstructions, not to mention all those which were done previously on the boy king, but somehow Zahi seems to forget about those.
And also I would say the same thing about reconstructions even if reconstructions were attempted of Alexander, early Chinese Emperors or Mayan kings. It still would be laughable, as whatever artwork remains from these times and places is more than enough to understand the identity of these people as Europeans, Asians and Native Americans and not some special type of "other". Only in Egypt is it necessary to take the identity of an ancient civilization and turn it into some type of "other" than and separate from the people indigenous to the areas from which it existed. There is no where else on the planet is such a concept or distinction necessary.
And the fact that modern Egypt is fundamentally different than ancient Egypt in many ways is undeniable and there are many more descendants of foreigners from Europe, Turkey, the Levant and elsewhere, especially in the North, to suggest they are 100% the same as in ancient times. But even with that, there are also many indigenous black African Egyptians in all parts of Egypt who are just as indigenous to Egypt as those who have a greater degree of foreign ancestry.
Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 10/14/2007 08:30PM by Doug M.
