"This is clearly seen on mummies of the
period and the extent of ancient Egyptian motifs found on them."
The best-preserved mummies found in Bawiti, including a female with
gold-plated breasts, have been transferred to a museum nearby. More
fragile specimens have been left in place and archaeologists plan to cover
them with glass cages.
Not much is known about Bahriya oasis before a town developed there in
the sixth century B.C. Its population grew under Greek rule, and Alexander
the Great built a temple there after he entered Egypt in 332 B.C., but the
town's heyday was in Roman times.
The Bahariya mummies are a remarkable record of life and religion in
an affluent community that was one of the premier wine-producing regions of
antiquity, the cemetery complex is also an archive documenting the development and
combination of cultures.
Here is the weft of history, the melding of
funerary and religious tradition over the
centuries. The inhabitants of the area are
thought to have begun burying their dead at
the oasis site soon after the founding of
Bahariya following the arrival of Alexander
the Great in 332-331 BC, and did so into
the 2nd century AD. Roman rule of Egypt
started shortly before the birth of Christ.
Grapes and dates grown in the region were
exported to the Nile Valley and then to
Rome and to Athens, and while this produced
considerable wealth for local notables,
there is evidence of democratisation in the
tombs. Some of the most magnificent
mummies, buried with pottery, amulets,
ornaments and other artefacts, lie beside
the simplest, linen-bound corpses.
In addition to providing clues to the
social structure of the time, the mummies
may also go some way towards revealing the
demographics, while analysis of bones and
teeth may explain what these people ate and
how they died.Yet perhaps the most
extraordinary aspect of the find is the
evidence of the artistic development in the
gilded masks and scenes painted on the
mummy cases, in a strange early echo of
naturalistic portraiture.
The Romanised Egyptians seem to have
adapted the funerary techniques of their
Pharaonic predecessors in crucial ways: not
only were the bodies of the dead to be
preserved for the afterlife, their
semi-realistic images were also painted to
last. Pharaonic death masks were Everyman
and Everywoman. Many found under the sands
of Bahariya are distinct individuals.
These are by no means the first gilded
Greco-Roman death masks from the period -
British archaeologist William Flinders
Petrie began studying them in 1888 - but
they are some of the most beautiful and the
most numerous preserved in a single site.
"The mask served as a substitute for the
head of the deceased, endowing the
individual with the attributes of deities
and assisting his or her passage to the
afterlife," accor- ding to Ancient Faces:
Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt, a recent
book published by the British Museum.
The confluence of techniques is evident in
the red-haired woman who caught the
archaeologist's eye when he first entered
the tomb. "While her hairstyle was clearly
Roman, reminiscent of terracotta statues of
the period," Dr Hawass wrote in the
American magazine Archaeology, "the
iconography of her mask, painted with
deities that protected the deceased and
eased her passage into the afterlife, was
pure Egyptian."
Yet while incorporating Egyptian symbolism,
the mask-painters of Bahariya seem to have
been intentionally painting people with
individual characters, pasts and, given the
afterlife, futures. The images are
personalised, sometimes in touching ways.
One female mummy is depicted with elaborate
make-up, her large eyes accentuated by
eyeliner, leading to speculation that she
may have been unmarried in life and was
beautified in death to enable her to find a
groom in the afterlife.
The mummy masks of Bahariya provide a
fascinating parallel to portraits found
tucked into the linen shrouds of mummified
corpses of another community from the same
period. Painted on thin panels of wood or
cloth, these depicted, with astonishing
realism, a people of Greek origin believed
to be descendants of Alexander the Great's
mercenaries, who lived in Egypt between the
1st and 3rd centuries AD.
One of the earliest forms of portraiture
discovered so far, this art flourished
briefly and mysteriously before vanishing,
just as inexplicably, with the onset of
Christianity.
Scans of the mummies' skulls in these cases
have revealed how accurate these portrait
painters were, prompting the belief that
their images were painted at the time of
death, to be carried in a funeral
procession and kept with the mummified body
as a lasting memorial. These portraits are
incredibly modern and naturalistic,
produced with confident brush strokes using
wax and natural pigments such as those
found in egg yolk.
Similar, less sophisticated techniques may
have been used to paint the masks in the
Bahariya tombs, by modelling the images
directly on the faces of the dead or dying.
It is still not certain how these faces
were produced: perhaps in some cases the
painter knew the deceased, fashioning the
masks and painting from memory, or perhaps
both masks and portraits were painted
before death.
The directness and expressiveness of the
images in both cases seems to provide a
link between ancient and modern
portraiture, somehow vaulting across the
idealised human representations of the
intervening centuries.
No one has looked on these faces for at
least 1,800 years, for the Bahariya Oasis
cemetery is also unique in its pristine
state.
