MORE than 80 years after the discovery of ancient Egypt’s most celebrated mummy, scientists have finally reached some agreement on how King Tutankhamun appeared in life.

Three independent attempts to reconstruct the face of the boy king who died 3,300 years ago have produced remarkably similar images.

Each reconstruction was produced separately by teams of artists and scientists working from computed tomography (CT) scans of King Tut’s mummified skull made on January 5. While all three impressions of his face differ in small details — particularly the shape of the end of the nose and ears, the flesh of which was poorly preserved — they reach similar conclusions about his overall appearance.

The proportions of the skull and the shape of the face are virtually identical in all the reconstructions, as are the size, shape and setting of the eyes. Each face also has a relatively large nose and a small chin.

The results promise to end the arguments about King Tut’s appearance since Howard Carter discovered his tomb in the Valley of the Kings in 1922. Dozens of artists have since produced competing impressions of his face, using the Pharaoh’s celebrated death mask and X-rays of the skull first taken in 1968, but there has been little consensus about which is most accurate.

Zahi Hawass, the Secretary-General of Egypt’s Supreme Council of Antiquities, decided to resolve this by commissioning three independent teams, from France, Egypt and the United States, to produce fresh reconstructions using the CT scans. The 1,700 high-resolution images were produced chiefly to determine whether King Tut had been murdered.

Each team used facial-reconstruction techniques commonly used to assist in the identification of murder victims.

Dr Hawass said: “The three reconstructions are all very similar in the unusual shape of the skull, the basic shape of the face, and the size, shape and setting of the eyes. The noses of all three are different, although the French and the American versions are more similar to each other than the Egyptian.”

An analysis of the CT scans concluded in March that the Pharaoh was more likely to have died from an infection in a fractured leg than by murder.

The reconstructions will be featured in King Tut’s Curse on the National Geographic Channel at 9pm on May 15.

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