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German researchers have determined that a well-known bust of Nefertiti actually has two faces, one a layer deeper than the visible face.
Alexander Huppertz, director of the Imaging Science Institute at Berlin's Charite hospital and medical school, headed up a team that discovered a detailed stone carving that differs from the external stucco face when they performed a computed tomography (CT) scan on the bust. "Until we did this scan, how deep the stucco was and whether a second face was underneath it was unknown," he said. "The hypothesis was that the stone underneath was just a support."
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The differences between the faces, though slight — creases at the corners of the mouth, a bump on the nose of the stone version — suggest to Huppertz that someone expressly ordered the adjustments between stone and stucco when royal sculptors immortalized the wife of Pharaoh Akhenaten 3,300 years ago.