An ancient Egyptian queen regarded as the Mona Lisa of the ancient world may not have been such a looker after all, German scientists said on Tuesday. A delicately carved face in the limestone core of the famous bust of Nefertiti suggests the royal sculptor at the time may have smoothed creases around the mouth and fixed a bumpy nose to depict the “Beauty of the Nile” in a better light. The bust of Nefertiti was found in Egypt in 1912 at Tell el-Amarna, the short-lived capital of Nefertiti's husband, the Pharaoh Akhenaten. It is now housed in Berlin's Altes Museum. “It is possible that the bust of Nefertiti was commissioned (probably by Akhenaten himself) to represent Nefertiti according to his personal perception,” Alexander Huppertz, director of the Imaging Science Institute in Berlin, and colleagues reported in the journal Radiology.. The analysis of Huppertz and his colleagues showed that compared to the outer stucco face, the inner face had less prominent cheekbones, a slight bump on the ridge of the nose, creases around the corner of mouth and cheeks, and less depth at the corners of the eyelids. The changes were possibly made to make the queen adhere more to the ideals of beauty of the time, the researchers said.
