The Mycenaean woman “comes alive” – She lived 3,500 years ago
Digital technology brings to life the “incredibly modern” form of a woman buried in a royal cementery
Digital technology has “brought” back to life a Mycenaean and Late Bronze Age woman who lived approximately 3,500 years ago.
The woman was around 30 when she was buried in a royal cemetery between the 16th and 17th centuries BC. Her burial site came to light in the 1950s, in the legendary seat of King Agamemnon .
“Incredibly modern form”
Dr Emily Hauser, the historian who commissioned the digital work, told the Observer: “It’s incredibly contemporary. It took my breath away. For the first time, we’re looking at the face of a woman from a kingdom associated with Helen of Troy – Helen’s sister, Clytemnestra, was queen of Mycenae – and the place from which the poet Homer imagined the Greeks of the Trojan War launching their campaign. Digital works like this convince us that these are real people.”
Hauser, a lecturer in classics and ancient history at the University of Exeter, also notes: “It is incredibly exciting to think that, for the first time since she was buried 3,500 years ago, we are able to see the face of this woman, a member of a royal house from the Bronze Age, and she is truly a face that could move a thousand ships.”
However, the woman died in the early Late Bronze Age, several hundred years before the supposed start of the Trojan War.
Hauser, whose book Mythica: A New History of Homer’s World, Through the Women Written Out of It will be published next week, said technical advances in forensic anthropology and DNA analysis, as well as radiocarbon dating and 3D digital printing, have led to spectacular improvements in representations of the ancient world.
“We can – for the first time – look the past in the eye,” according to Hauser.
Women warriors?
The woman was buried with a mask and weapons, including three swords that were initially thought to belong to the man buried next to her, but are now believed to have belonged to her.
As Hauser explains, “Initially, it was thought that the man next to her was her husband, but DNA confirmed that it was a brother. “This woman was buried there because of her lineage, not because of her marriage. This shows us how important she was… The data that is coming to light shows that war equipment in Late Bronze Age burials often belongs to women, which overturns beliefs about their role in warfare.”
Archaeological findings and DNA analyses allow “the women of antiquity to come out of the shadows.”
The condition of the woman’s bones suggests that she suffered from arthritis in her vertebrae and hands, perhaps “evidence that she had been weaving for years, a common and physically tiring female activity, which Helen engages in in the Iliad,” according to Hauser.
“In a way, we connect the experiences of women in antiquity with ancient myths,” she adds.
Source: Guardian