Faces of Roman Egypt

In Egypt, it was customary to mummify the deceased and create a likeness of them, often in the form of a mummy mask or an anthropoid (human-form) coffin. 

Some of the men and women who lived in Roman Egypt chose instead to have themselves represented in portraits painted on thin wooden panels or linen shrouds that were affixed to the mummy wrappings. 

A painted portrait panel is placed over Herakleides’ face, showing a young man with a dark complexion and moustache. He wears a gilded laurel wreath in his hair. The portrait’s background is also gilded.

Thanks to the painted name above her right shoulder, we know that this striking woman was called Isidora. Like Herakleides, she was buried in a shroud that was painted red, part of which is still intact around her portrait.   

Her elegant clothing and jewels, and the gilded adornments on her hair, clothing, and jewelry suggest that she was a woman of high rank who lived around AD 100.     

Another painting technique used to produce mummy portraits was tempera, in which the raw pigment was mixed with animal glue as a binder. 

Most male subjects wear a white funerary tunic with dark clavi (woven stripes) on either side and a cloak draped over the shoulder. 

In Rome, clavi distinguished social status; their significance in Roman Egypt is uncertain and their presence on the portraits may be aspirational . . . 

Women are generally shown wearing a pink or purple funerary tunic with clavi. The delicate features of this woman’s face—created through the artist’s excellent technical mastery of tempera painting—are contrasted with the bold strokes that render the folds of her tunic. 

Her pearl earrings would have been imported, perhaps from the Persian Gulf, and signal that she was a wealthy, cosmopolitan woman.

In a small number of portraits, men appear to be bare-chested, which is true for Herakleides (shown earlier) and for this man.  

Over the first to third centuries AD, popular hairstyles for men ranged from full and voluminous to close shaven (as for this man, who probably lived around AD 220–235). 

Women’s hairstyles and jewelry also kept pace with what their contemporaries were wearing in the empire’s capital. 

This woman’s curly hair is bound in a bun on top of her head, framed by multiple rows of curls above her forehead—a favored hairstyle for women in the Flavian period, around AD 75–100. 

In Roman Egypt, images of deities were painted on wooden panels similar to those used for mummy portraits. The panels would have been displayed in the home or in shrines and used in personal religious devotion to call upon protective gods and goddesses. 

Her cult was especially popular in the Ptolemaic and Roman periods, both in Egypt and throughout the Mediterranean.  

Like Isis, he was a fertility deity, as demonstrated by the grain measure he wears on his head.   

Some portraits might have been made during a person’s lifetime and displayed in the home prior to being used in their burial. The purpose of this panel portrait is ambiguous. 

Other individuals also hold implements in their hands that may signal their religious beliefs, particularly life beyond death, as the cult of Isis promised. 

The small cup in this man’s right hand contains wine. In his left hand he holds a folded floral wreath.

The subjects of mummy portraits range from young children to the elderly. Portraits of children were sometimes hastily completed (perhaps indicating an unexpected death), but this one is of high quality. 

The small container the boy wears around his neck may have been used to hold a protective amulet written on papyrus.