Sunday, December 04, 2005

Pharaoh Furore

More about the way in which Tutankhamun is being portrayed in the Tutankhamun exhibition: "The weight of evidence indicates Tut had a North African complexion, i.e. a light caffe latte, creamy brown skin pigmentation. But there is just enough wiggle room to argue about it, for the sake of argument . . . . For instance, the shape of Tut's skull is 'dolichocephalic,' literally 'jar-headed.' It is longer and more attenuated, not round and bulbous. His jaw is 'prognathous,' i.e. jutting. Portraits of his father, Akhenaten, in the Egyptian museum in Berlin show him with a very prominent jaw and thick, sensuous lips. Dr. Anthony Falsetti, a forensic anthropologist in charge of the C.A. Pound Human Identification Laboratory at the University of Florida in Gainesville, says such signs are what anthropologists look for in skeletons to determine race."

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