Deyner´s Notes!

⌛ Reading time: 8 minutes

Have been a fan of ancient photography for a while by now and each day i surf the Internet can't stop marveling on how humans have evolved the art of painting and photography since old days to recent days giving, from time to time, touches of reality closer and closer to the reality itself.

Today, digital photography has made us forget those efforts made by early pioneers in the field of transmitting reality through paintings but; by fortune, there still some examples that remind us that in early days, there were people worried about this idea and they gave the best of themselves trying to show us real faces, faces that convey feelings, feelings that make us think today that today human beings are not so different than people living 2000 years ago.

Mummy portraits are real people portraits

Archeologists have gotten used to discover all kinds of mummies spreaded all over Egypt. It seemed that nothing they could discover in the arid sands of that country could alter the original mummified burial concept that has always been had of the Egyptians through history. So what a BIG surprise for the British archaeologist W.M. Flinders Petrie when excavating around the Egyptian city of Fayum in the late 1800´s he discovered the first mummmmies with a living portrait of the mummy inside incorporated into the part of the deceased's face.....Whaaaat!? **:o**

Fig 1. *A Fayum-style mummy with its typical portrait in the front of the face (https://classicalwisdom.com)*

This was a totally different concept of what was believed until that moment the usual mummification and burial process among common egyptians took place. It was a mystery? Why those mummies had those portraits? Who painted those portraits?

The history of the Fayum mummies can be traced even years before Mr. Petrie excavated around the city of Fayum when first Fayum portrait mummies were found by Pietro della Valle in 1615. Years later, an Austrian businessman and art collector named Theodor Graf (1840-1903), bought several of those portraits taken from the cemeteries at er-Rubayat and elsewhere, exposing them across Europe raising people's curiosity around those so uncommon artifacts. Then years later Mr. Petrie led a british expedition for the Egypt Exploration Fund excavating cementeries near the site of Hawara finding several of those mummies with such portraits...He was amazed by his discoveries and fascinated by the ancient eyes staring back at him: the rest of the world would be too.

Fig 2. A portrait of a Fayum mummy: a look from the afterlife (https://egiptologia.com)

Most of those mummies and their respective portraits can be dated back to the Imperial Roman era, from the late 1st century BC or the early 1st century AD onwards. They belong to the time when Egypt was starting to become a roman province and many Romans citizens began settling there and adopted local practices including the mortuary ritual of egyptian mummification, mixing ancient egyptian myths with their own funerary traditions.

Fig 3. *The evolution of Egyptian coffins: from the coffin of Henutmehyt, New Kingdom between 1550-1070 BCE to complete painted Fayum portrait and mummy of Artemidorus (https://www.thecollector.com)*

The study of several of those portraits tell us a lot about the people depicted there: 75 percent of the panels studied were painted on linden wood, which wasn’t native to Egypt. So mummy painters, apparetly, imported the material all the way from Northern Europe. A manufactured red pigment identified in the works was traced to southern Spain. And the use of indigo across the paintings potentially indicates that the deep-blue pigment was mass produced.

Fig 4. *A portrait of a Fayum-style mummy of a young woman where we can see a wide use of red pigments that are believed to have been brought from southern Spain (https://classicalwisdom.com)*

Some conservators even noticed small fibers embedded in the dye, which suggests that it was recycled from Egypt’s textile industry. This kind of information clearly indicate that not everyone could have had that kind of portrait in their mummy as those imported materials were extremely expensive, so the people buried in the Fayum cementry must have been important (or rich) people in their time.

Many experts have debated about the real use case of these paintings beyond accompanying the deceased to the afterlife. It is assumed that when one of those people died, his relatives before burying him, preferred to keep his mummified body for some time in their own homes and then ordered this type of mortuary portrait that would serve first as a way to give some life to those inert bodies, as a reminder of who he/she was, or what he/she looked like in life. After a time the deceased was buried according to Egyptian funerary rites, always accompanied by the painting that represented the person in life.

One of the key aspects of such kind of portraits is the fact that they show us not only a wide diversity of the people who once lived in Roman Egypt but also the intricacies of hairstyles, clothing, and jewellery that were popular two thousand years ago helping archeologists to develop their work uncovering the customs of people who lived by that time. Those portraits also represent a great percent of the few preserved examples of ancient Greek-style paintings we have nowadays. They are a rare type of mixed art between the Egyptian, Greek and Roman styles, one of a kind.

For generations amazing many people around the world; many those paintings are so real that the creator of such artworks perhaps inadvertently ended up transmitting even feelings, something that the flat Egyptian painting never dreamed of producing or transmitting.

Fig 5. We can see the quality of those paintings, reaching the point of transmitting feelings even (https://www.smithsonianmag.com)

Today we can find several of those paintings with their respective mummies spreaded around the finest history museums around the whole world. For the history, only about a thousand Fayum-style mummies have survived centuries of vandalism and looting, which is often considered a really small amount of those rare artifacts given the fact that Rome ruled Egypt for centuries.

Final thoughts...by now

There are still many unanswered questions about the Fayum mummies and their portraits: ...did the portraitist paint from memory when death had already arrived? ...was he inspired by the corpse and added a few touches of life? ...was the model the person still alive, who had himself portrayed so that in the future that face would serve other people to remeber them as they were?

The truth is that we may never know, but the fact is that these types of portraits are truly incredible artworks, preserved for posterity thanks to the aridity of the desert where they were discovered. By looking those so realistic paintings, we cannot avoid to think on that ancient society so far in time and, at the same time, so close in feelings; a proof that despite the passing of the years humanity is still one.

If you are an enthusiast of historical photograph and amazing discoveries and stories do not forget to follow me at https://coil.com/u/deyner1984 because i will be releasing soon new and impressive contents about it!!!

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