During a round tour in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo’s downtown, close to the king Tutankhamun collection, a unique coffin is covered with portraits instead of a mask like the young king Tutankhamun; there are extra traditional coffins called Fayum portraits.
Fayum is an oasis that lies around 100 km to the south of Cairo, with unrepeated monuments.
The Egyptian mummy portraits dating from the Roman period when Egypt became a Roman province are considered one of the most beautiful creations of the classical world.
The Egyptians continued to mummify the bodies of the dead during the first three centuries of the Roman period. These rectangular wooden panels, with the image of the deceased painted on them, were placed over the mummy’s face instead of the famous masks of the Ptolemaic and pharaonic periods.
The earliest example found so far dates to the reign of the Roman emperor Tiberius (14-37 AD). These images, known as Fayum portraits, were first discovered by the famous British archeologist William Flinders Petrie in 1888 at hawara; Petri was excavating the pyramid complex of Amenemhat the third, known now as kasr el teeh. After encountering many difficulties, he excavated the Roman cemetery and discovered numerous coffins incorporating the magnificent portrait panels that would astonish the world with their naturalism.
During 1911 and 1912, Petrie discovered other mummy portraits which would enrich the museum collections of the world, including the Egyptian museum, with sublime, beautiful, creative paintings of the people of this age. The elite style of their clothing and hairstyles gives us an idea of the range of accessories used during the Roman period.
These portraits, eventually found in many places in Egypt, clearly demonstrate the interaction between roman and Egyptian civilization and were made when cartonnage masks were still in use. At this same time, realistic plaster masks and heads were also in use. These masks & heads were placed in a position of elevation relative to the body giving the impression that the dead are watching the living.
These works are considered one of the primary sources of the Egyptian museum, which endeavors to teach visitors about this great and ancient civilization.
Fayum portrait
At the beginning of the first century, it became customary to set a portrait of the deceased into the mummy bandages. They replaced the mummy mask that covered the mummy’s head and chest during the ancient period to help the soul recognize its owner in the afterlife.
Although mummy portraits were found in many places, from Saqqara, in the north, to Aswan, in the south, scholars call them “Fayum portraits” because they were first found in Fayum and as a great many were discovered there.
The portraits were painted in encaustic (colored beeswax) or with tempera (egg yolk mixed with pigments ) on rectangular panels of sycamore, cedar, pine, or acacia wood measuring around 40cm to 20cm. A very few portraits were painted on linen using the same techniques.
It is believed that a portrait was painted during the lifetime of the subject to hang on the house wall, only to be removed after death when it was placed over the mummy’s face. Some portraits, however, were undoubtedly diest painted after the death of the individual; for example, when someone died unexpectedly and especially when the subjects were children.
The Fayum portraits are painted in a realistic style that often expresses sadness and melancholy and usually depicts faces frontally, sometimes looking slightly to the left. Fayum portraits differ from ancient Egyptian representations, which on the walls of the temples and tombs always show the face in profile.
As for the subjects’ dress, men usually wore white tunics, while those of the women were purple or, in a few cases, green or blue. Women’s robes were decorated with women-colored bands.
It is possible to date their portraits based on the hairstyle and type of beard grown by the men and the jewelry and hairstyle of the women. Generally, styles followed those in vogue for the portraits of the imperial family in Rome and were copied throughout the Roman provinces.
The portraits were used in Egypt from the first until the third-century a.d and disappeared gradually with the spread of Christianity in the third and fourth centuries. Because the new religion didn’t encourage it, mummification ceased to be practiced.