I know there’s already a thread on this column, but it’s slipped off the front page, and it’s really a different topic. Towards the end of fierra’s recent column on Greek and Egyptian gods (the beginning of the penultimate paragraph), we have the sentence
But from the context of the rest of that paragraph, it sounds like the cemetery referenced was a Greek cemetery, not Roman. Was there some reason the Romans would be burying members of the Greek upper class with Greek portraits, or does another copy boy need to be, ahem, taken care of?
Might be a minor mistake in there, though I’m not an Egyptologist - I have read that the cemetary and the bulk of the mummies were Roman era ( specifically 1rst - mid-3rd century C.E. ). Some pics:
Anyway the portraits are usually seem to be referred to as ‘Greco-Roman’ in style and that particular population apparently had a high proportion of Greek-speaking Roman subjects ( remember Rome had inherited Egypt from a Greek-speaking regime with at least something of a Greek-speaking urban base, even though the bulk of the rural population and the population generally was “native” ). So dispute over dates aside, it still would back Fierra’s general point.
I’m not sure that we need to attack the copy boy - my original write up said that “the clothing & jewellery in them dated many of the bodies to the fourth and third centuries BC, through to the second century AD”, but I agreed with Ed’s editing it for readability to the shorter form. Second century AD puts it firmly into Roman territory for the later bodies, fitting with the Roman cemetery description. Maybe it needs re-expanding for clarity. I should note that of the images of the portraits that I have personally seen, the earliest dated back to 24 AD - my source may have exaggerated the earlier ages of some of the bodies.
One of my sources notes that this style of painting was known in Greece from the fifth & fourth centuries BC onwards, but according to another of my sources, due to the wetter climate elsewhere in the Med, no other examples survive (which makes you wonder how they can date its origin back in Greece), so these are important finds for Greek art history. Faiyum style portraits are found elsewhere in Egypt too, they are named so as that was the earliest discovery of them & there were a lot of them found there.
A lot of cemetaries from the Ptolemaic period were reused or expanded by the Romans during their occupancy - many of the best preserved Ptolemaic cemetaries are in the western desert, such as the Siamun Tomb in the Siwa Oasis - it & its neighbouring tomb (the “Crocodile’s tomb”) & another of an anonymous man & his wife are dated to the early Ptolemaic period by their striking decorations - and then the latter tomb was reused by the Romans, who carved additional niches in the walls to hold more bodies.
At the Dakhla Oasis, the cemetery was probably first used under the Romans & you can see a succession of religious motifs, Egyptian gods distorted by Hellenistic & Roman influences.
Nearby at Kharga oasis, instead of a Greek-Roman shift, you can see a pagan Roman cemetery shifting to an early Christian one. Early Christian tombs continued the embalming practices of the Egyptian funerary customs.
Anyway, it’s fascinating how the cultures blend & merge & borrow bits from one another, or misunderstand or re-emphasise points from each other (like distorting the religious images of the Egyptian gods).