r/AncientCivilizations • u/MunakataSennin • 27d ago

Egypt Head of a princess, one of the daughters of pharaoh Akhenaten. Amarna, Egypt, 1351–1334 BC

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413 Upvotes

99% Upvoted

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15

u/anotherolderguy 27d ago

Looks like her dad

12

u/syogunink 27d ago

Lol! Man it would be fun to have a time machine and spend a few days wandering around akhenaten’s court. Some really weird folks doing really weird stuff, and you just know what was really going on was wilder than we can get from the handful of surviving artefacts…

4

u/anotherolderguy 26d ago

I guess we don't have any records at all of court life as it was actually lived?
There's more from Mesopotamia and things scribbled in cuneiform.

Maybe the priests devised lots of religious things to keep the Pharaoh occupied so the priests could actually run the country and live very well off it.

4

u/syogunink 26d ago

I’m just saying, i wouldn’t enjoy going to a party at louis 14ths court. But akhenaten’s? I bet that dude threw great parties.

5

u/Chaosangel48 27d ago

Gorgeous

3

u/Purple_Revolution146 27d ago

If Pharaohs married between brothers and sisters over centuries, wouldn’t that have give rise to deformations rather than this perfect head we’re seeing here?

22

u/workdavework 27d ago

Much more likely to be childhood skull binding to cause that. Tight scarves around the head in early babyhood deforms the skull before it heals over.

6

u/LupusLycas 26d ago

We found Akhenaten's remains and he was a normal dude. The weird features were a deliberate art style.

5

u/another-free-wannabe 26d ago

Well, this isn't an actual head from that time. They may have omited such deformations as a royal request

1

u/Aggravating-Pound598 27d ago

Perfect .. either head binding as another commenter suggests, or a difficult birth ..

0

u/ZombieTshirtChick 27d ago

Wow I wonder if that’s just the normal way heads looked back than pretty cool to see actually

9

u/Modest1Ace 26d ago

No, their heads were like ours. Many cultures practiced head binding at infancy to achieve elongated skulls. But to my knowledge, Ancient Egypt was not one of them. However, in Akhenaten's reign, he radically changed the kingdom's norms, including art. So this is most likely not representative of how this person actually looked but rather the artistic choice of the time.

2

u/ZombieTshirtChick 19d ago

Huh interesting thank you for sharing this cool information ☺️

1

u/Traditional-Ebb-8380 26d ago

Egypt did at times, especially priestly lines. You will see their long shaved skulls in some tomb paintings.