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Mummy portraits have been found across Egypt, but most common in Hawara, Faiyum Basin and Hadrianic Roman city Antinoopolis. “Fayum portraits” is generally used as stylistic, rather than geographic, description. While painted cartonnage mummy cases date back to pharaonic times. These Egyptian-Roman “death masks” are far more naturalistic than anything seen in western hemisphere for at least next 600 years. There is something disconcerting about gazing into face of someone who lived so long ago and have them look straight back at you – long and level, quizzical in a way that simulates direct connection.
Portraits date to Imperial Roman era, from late 1st Century BC or early 1st Century AD onwards. It is not clear when their production ended, but recent research suggests middle of 3rd Century. They are among the largest groups among very few survivors of panel painting tradition of classical world, which continued into Byzantine, Eastern Mediterranean and Western traditions in post-classical world, including local tradition of Coptic iconography in Egypt.
Portraits covered faces of bodies that were mummified for burial. Extant examples indicate that they were mounted into bands of cloth that were used to wrap bodies. Almost all have now been detached from mummies. They usually depict single person, showing the head or head and upper chest, viewed frontally. In terms of artistic tradition, images clearly derive more from Greco-Roman artistic traditions than Egyptian ones. Two groups of portraits can be distinguished by technique: one of encaustic (wax) paintings, other in tempera. Former are usually of higher quality.
About 900 mummy portraits are known at present. Majority were found in necropolis of Fayum. Due to hot dry Egyptian climate, paintings are frequently very well preserved, often retaining their brilliant colors seemingly unfaded by time. Under Greco-Roman rule, Egypt hosted several Greek settlements, mostly concentrated in Alexandria, but also in a few other cities, where Greek settlers lived alongside with native Egyptians for all ethnicities, according to lower estimates. Fayum’s earliest Greek inhabitants were soldier-veterans and cleruchs (elite military officials) who were settled by Ptolemaic kings on reclaimed lands.
Native Egyptians also came to settle in Fayum from all over country, Nile Delta, Upper Egypt, Oxyrhynchus and Memphis, to undertake labor involved in land reclamation process, as attested by personal names, local cults, and recovered papyri. It is estimated that as much as 30% of population of Fayum was Greek during Ptolemaic period, with rest being native Egyptians. By Roman period, much of “Greek” population of Fayum was made-up of either Hellenized Egyptians or people of mixed Egyptian-Greek origins. Later, in Roman Period, many veterans of Roman army, who, initially at least, were not Egyptian but people from disparate cultural and ethnic backgrounds, settled in area after completion of their service, and formed social relations and intermarried with local populations. While commonly believed to represent Greek settlers in Egypt, Fayum portraits instead reflect complex synthesis of predominant Egyptian culture and that of elite Greek minority in city.
According to various sources, early Ptolemaic Greek colonists married local women and adopted Egyptian religious beliefs, and by Roman times, their descendants were viewed as Egyptians by Roman rulers, despite their own self-perception of being Greek. Portraits represent both descendants of ancient Greek mercenaries, who had fought for Alexander the Great, settled in Egypt and married local women, as well as native Egyptians who were majority, many of whom had adopted Greek or Latin names, then seen as ‘status symbols’. A DNA study shows genetic continuity between Pre-Ptolemaic, Ptolemaic and Roman populations of Egypt, indicating that foreign rule impacted Egypt’s population only to very limited degree at genetic level.
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