King Tut's face 'reconstructed'

Scientists have produced the first digital image of the face of the legendary pharaoh after scanning his 3,000-year-old mummy.

Egyptian scientists have produced the first digital image of the face of the legendary pharaoh Tutankhamun after scanning his 3,000-year-old mummy, authorities said on Thursday.

'The image created by computer sketches the precise traits of the pharaoh's face for the first time since his tomb was opened,' Sabri Abdelaziz of the Egyptian upper council of antiquities said.

The tomb of the pharaoh, who died under mysterious circumstances at about the age of 25, was unearthed by British archaeologists in 1922 in the Valley of the Kings.

The team opened the solid gold sarcophagus and ran the mummy under the computer tomography scanner, whose shadowy image showed that the cranium was still intact.

The examination marked the fourth time since its discovery that Tutankhamun's sarcophagus was opened: in 1925 by its discoverer, Howard Carter, then in 1969 and in 1986 for X-rays and finally this week.