Portrait of a boy, removed from his embalmed body

Painted portraits placed on embalmed bodies were held in place by the elaborate linen wrappings that were a crucial part of the burial. On this example, the thin limewood was cut to shape so that it would fit the head end of the boy’s wrapped body, the board’s rough edges concealed by the arrangement of the textiles. Whoever painted the portrait seems to have known how it would be used, since the artist applied dark grey paint in broad strokes on the lower part of the board. A protective pattern of criss-crossed bandages covered this area when the portrait was in place on the body. No trace of the body or the wrappings survives. The British archaeologist W.M. Flinders Petrie, who first excavated many of these portraits (including this example) at Hawara in the Faiyum, was more interested in the portraits than the textiles or human remains, apart from a hundred or skulls that he sent to London for further study. The rest of the bodies and textiles were either burned or reburied without a trace. Petrie described his own work at Hawara as ‘plundering’. A proponent of scientific racism, he believed that both the portraits and the skulls would reveal the ethnicities of Greeks, Egyptians, Syrians, and Jews, as if these were verifiable physical categories instead of social identities informed by European ideas about ‘race’ – and by widespread racial prejudice.

Not everyone in ancient Egypt received embalming rites, and not everyone embalmed when in Roman Egypt had a portrait in this style. Most portraits, including this one, come from the Faiyum region, where many people of Greek heritage had settled since around 323 BC, when Alexander the Great brought Egypt under his control. By 30 BC, when the death of Cleopatra saw Egypt change hands to Roman rule, Greek and Egyptian culture both flourished in areas like the Faiyum, where Greek settlers had married into Egyptian families. In this multi-ethnic, multi-lingual society, landowners, military officers, and priests read the poet Homer in classical Greek, supported temples to both Greek and Egyptian gods, and buried their dead according to the ancient Egyptian rites. Under the Roman empire, the upper levels of provincial Egyptian society lost some of their privileges thanks to new tax laws and citizenship rules, but using art forms like portraiture offered a way to maintain their high social status in local life – and in death.

Christina Riggs, August 2021

In Roman Egypt, it became fashionable for the wealthy to place portraits of the deceased over their mummified bodies. Large numbers of these portraits were uncovered in the late nineteenth century and displayed in London, drawing huge crowds. Although from an Egyptian context, they were treated like Western artworks – some were even sent to the National Gallery. These portraits were also used as uncomfortable evidence for studying racial types in Roman Egypt.