The mummies came from Abusir el-Meleq, an ancient Egyptian city on a floodplain to the south of Cairo, and they were buried between 1380 B.C.

Scientists at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History in Tübingen, Germany, sequenced the mummies' DNA in 2017; it was the first successful reconstruction of an ancient Egyptian mummy's genome, Live Science reported at the time. .

And now, researchers at Parabon NanoLabs, a DNA technology company in Reston, Virginia, have used that genetic data to create 3D models of the mummies' faces through a process called forensic DNA phenotyping, which uses genetic analysis to predict the shape of facial features and other aspects of a person's physical appearance.

Related: Image gallery: The faces of Egyptian mummies revealed.

Working with ancient human DNA can be challenging for two reasons: the DNA is often highly degraded, and it's usually mixed with bacterial DNA, said Ellen Greytak, Parabon's director of bioinformatics.

"Between those two factors, the amount of human DNA available to sequence can be very small," Greytak told Live Science in an email.

In those cases, scientists can replace absent genetic data with substituted values that come from other SNPs nearby, said Janet Cady, a Parabon bioinformatics scientist.

Statistics that are calculated from thousands of genomes reveal how closely associated each SNP is with an absent neighbor, Cady told Live Science in an email.

The processes used on these ancient mummies could also help scientists to recreate faces to identify modern remains, Greytak told Live Science.

Of the approximately 175 cold cases that Parabon researchers have helped to solve using genetic genealogy, so far nine were analyzed using the techniques from this study, Greytak said.