See the Face of a Royal Woman Who Lived in Greece 3,500 Years Ago Created by digital artist Juanjo Ortega G., the digital reconstruction depicts a woman who died in her mid-30s during the late Bronze Age Digital artist Juanjo Ortega G. created an image of the woman's face based on a clay model created in the 1980s. Juanjo Ortega G. Roughly 3,500 years ago, a woman was buried in a royal cemetery in present-day Greece. Now, we can imagine what she might have looked like during the late Bronze Age. Digital artist Juanjo Ortega G. has created an image of the woman’s face that allows historians to “peer back into the eyes of the past,” says Emily Hauser, who commissioned the artwork, to the Observer’s Dalya Alberge. Hauser, a historian and classics scholar at the University of Exeter, writes about the woman in her forthcoming book, Penelope’s Bones: A New History of Homer’s World Through the Women Written Out of It. In the book, which comes out later this year, Hauser tells the often-overlooked stories of women in ancient Greece—including the mysterious royal woman. “Too many of the faces we see peering back at us from the ancient world are those of men,” Hauser writes in a social media post. While working on the book, she hired Ortega G. to create a digital model of the woman’s face, based on a clay reconstruction made by researchers at Manchester University in the 1980s. The artist also drew on wall paintings from the time, particularly those from Santorini, where researchers discovered “a striking image of a woman with red-gold hair and blue eyes—which he used as his inspiration here,” Hauser tells Smithsonian magazine. The woman’s remains were discovered in the 1950s at the Mycenae archaeological site in Greece. In Greek mythology—including Homer’s epic poems—Mycenae was ruled by Agamemnon, the king who led the attack on Troy during the Trojan War. “For the first time, we are looking into the face of a woman from a kingdom associated with Helen of Troy—Helen’s sister, Clytemnestra, was queen of Mycenae in legend—and from where the poet Homer imagined the Greeks of the Trojan War setting out,” Hauser tells the Observer. Though the woman died “several hundred years before the supposed date of the Trojan war,” Hauser adds, “such digital reconstructions persuade us that these were real people.” An analysis revealed the woman was in her mid-30s at the time of her death and was suffering from arthritis in her hands, probably due to a repetitive activity like weaving. She died during the late Bronze Age, between the 16th and 17th centuries B.C.E. The woman was found buried with a death mask and a warrior kit that contained various weapons, including three swords. But because she was interred next to a man, researchers long thought those artifacts belonged to him, not her. They also suspected she was married to the man. But DNA analysis later revealed that the man was her brother, not her husband. Researchers now suspect the grave goods may have belonged to the woman, who was “buried there by virtue of her birth, not her marriage,” Hauser tells the Observer. “The remains from the ancient world are telling us a different story from the one we always thought,” she writes in the Conversation. “A woman didn’t have to be a wife to make a difference.” More broadly, the woman is a “fascinating case study” of the various ways archaeologists have misread the women of the ancient past, Hauser tells Smithsonian magazine. “She’s doing a lot to tell us more about women in the Late Bronze Age world—and to push against the biases not just of her own ancient world, but of the later archaeologists who uncovered her, too,” she adds. “And that’s a fascinating story to tell in how it opens up a previously unknown side of the prehistoric Greek world.” Get the latest stories in your inbox every weekday.