For many years, since the Caucasians came in contact with the very sophisticated civilization of ancient Egypt; there has been needless debates and denials on how ancient Egyptians actually looked like. This denial is evident in the refusal of some Hollywood movies to use black people in the portrayal of characters of ancient Egyptians. Ancient Khemet and Egypt was the land of black people with Afro hair, as shown in the paintings and hieroglyphics of Egyptian tombs and pyramids; still there is a campaign amongst white supremacists to obscure this information.
However, using artificial intelligence, Dutch photographer Bas Uterwijk; released on Friday modern images of the Egyptian King Akhenaten (Amenhotep IV) and Queen Nefertiti.
#Akhenaten and #Nefertiti
I don't claim to be a scientist. The historical portraits I make are based on artworks mostly made during the period of their subjects.
With AI I filter out the sculpting styles of ancient portraiture and guide it to a credible outcome#artbreeder pic.twitter.com/Qt3485Gnaq— Ganbrood (@ganbrood) February 19, 2021
Egyptindependent reports that; The pictures, which Uterwijk posted on his Twitter page, are based on old carvings and engravings that portrayed the two.
The artist said in his post: “I don’t claim to be a scientist. The historical portraits I make are based on artworks mostly made during the period of their subjects. With AI I filter out the sculpting styles of ancient portraiture and guide it to a credible outcome.”
Uterwijk is famous for using a GAN (generative adversarial network) to convert old paintings of public figures and famous people into photographs. He had previously converted one of Fayoum’s historic paintings into a modern photograph.
GANs are a class of machine learning frameworks that are capable of generating realistic-looking photographs of humans, constructing 3D models of objects from images, and much more.