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She lived 3,500 years ago – but facial reconstruction technology has brought a woman from late bronze age Mycenae back to life.
The woman was in her mid-30s when she was buried in a royal cemetery between the 16th and 17th centuries BC. The site was uncovered in the 1950s on the Greek mainland at Mycenae, the legendary seat of Homer’s King Agamemnon.
Dr Emily Hauser, the historian who commissioned the digital reconstruction, told the Observer: “She’s incredibly modern. She took my breath away.
“For the first time, we are looking into the face of a woman from a kingdom associated with Helen of Troy – Helen’s sister, Clytemnestra, was queen of Mycenae in legend – and from where the poet Homer imagined the Greeks of the Trojan war setting out. Such digital reconstructions persuade us that these were real people.”
Hauser, a senior lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter, said: “It is incredibly exciting to think that, for the first time since she was laid beneath the ground over 3,500 years ago, we are able to gaze into the actual face of a bronze age royal woman – and it truly is a face to launch a thousand ships.
“This woman died around the beginning of the late bronze age, several hundred years before the supposed date of the Trojan war.”
A digital artist, Juanjo Ortega G, has developed the lifelike face from a clay reconstruction of the same woman that was made in the 1980s by Manchester University, pioneers of one of the major methods in facial reconstruction.
Hauser, whose book Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women Written Out of It will be published next week, said that technical developments in forensic anthropology and DNA analysis, as well as radiocarbon dating and 3D digital printing, have led to dramatic improvements in reconstructions of the ancient world.
“We can – for the first time – peer back into the eyes of the past.”
The woman had been buried with an electrum face mask and a warrior kit of weapons – including three swords that were assumed to be associated with the man buried next to her, but are now thought to have belonged to her.
Hauser said: “The traditional story is that, if you have a woman next to a man, she must be his wife.” Facial similarities had previously been noted, but DNA has confirmed that these were brother and sister rather than husband and wife.
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“This woman was buried there by virtue of her birth, not her marriage. That tells us a different story about how important she was … Data that is coming out is suggesting that far more of what archaeologists call warrior kits are associated with women than with men in these late bronze age burials, which is completely overturning our assumptions of how women are associated with war.”
She added that archaeological evidence and DNA analysis were allowing “the real women of ancient history to step out of the shadows”.
The condition of the woman’s bones suggests that she suffered from arthritis in her vertebrae and hands, perhaps “evidence of repeated weaving, a common and physically wearing activity among women, and one which we have seen Helen undertaking in the Iliad,” Hauser said.
“So this is such a wonderful way to connect real women’s experiences to the ancient myths and tales.”
