He is the first ancient Egyptian to be reconstructed in this way from genetic as well as skeletal evidence.

His face is, in the most direct sense possible, the face of ancient Egypt — not the stylized faces of tomb paintings or stone statues, but the face of a person who actually lived, who saw the early Old Kingdom world around him with eyes set in this skull.

Ancient Egypt’s Writing And The Limits Of What It Tells Us

One of the peculiarities of studying ancient Egypt is the disproportion between what the textual record preserves and what it omits.

Egyptian civilization produced an enormous volume of written material — inscriptions, administrative records, religious texts, personal biographies — across three thousand years of literate history.