Kansas City, Mo. ? Thanks to an unusual pairing of forensics and art, and a tool normally reserved for tracking down criminals, there’s now a facial image to go along with a tightly wrapped 2,500-year-old mummy at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

The facial image was created through a unique collaboration that included special agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives who are trained in using a computer program to develop sketch portraits of criminal suspects.

“What we’re celebrating is … a bit of CSI and art,” Julian Zugazagoitia, director and CEO of the Nelson-Atkins, said Friday before unveiling a sketch of the face of the museum’s mummy, Ka-i-nefer.

The program, called E-FIT, or Electronic Facial Identification Technique, has been used for 17 years to help track down “murderers, serial rapists, terrorists, arsonists and many others,” said Kenneth Melson, deputy director of the ATF, who called the ATF collaboration with the museum “unprecedented.”

“They’ve really gone back 2,500 years to determine what this person might have looked like,” Melson said. “We were able in essence to use a modern law enforcement tool to bring the past to life.”

The mummy, which dates back to about 525 B.C., and was acquired by the Nelson-Atkins from Emory University in 2000, is part of the museum’s Ancient Art Galleries, which opened in May after a $1.7 million renovation. The opening sparked the interest of a local cardiologist, Dr. Randall Thompson, who has examined about 20 other mummies for cardiac disease.

Thompson contacted the Nelson-Atkins to see if he could review X-rays and CT scans done on the Nelson’s mummy about eight years ago. Through those exams, Thompson said Ka-i-nefer, a name given to the mummy by the museum, was about 50 years old, 5’5″ tall, and wore a size 7 sandal.

Thompson thought there might be more to learn when he found out about the ATF’s forensics tool for crafting facial composites. He contacted the ATF, which agreed to take on the project as a community service.

The ATF assigned two agents, Robert Strode and Sharon Whitaker, who are trained in E-FIT, to the process. Work began over the summer and took about two to three months.

Working with the Nelson’s experts, Thompson, and the past X-rays and scans, Strode and Whitaker each used E-FIT to devise their own facial image for the mummy. They then compared their images and came up with the final version, which they laid digitally over X-rays of the mummy’s skull.

Robert Cohon, curator of ancient art at the Nelson-Atkins, said working with the ATF was a “genuine pleasure,” and that giving the mummy a face was initially important because it was “going to be another piece of the puzzle.”

He said the end result is more than an image of what the mummy might have looked like.