The mystery of the faces of Fayoum .. Egyptians or Greeks .. How was its historical context?

Mercy of mourning

In the nineteenth century, Victorian England spread a phenomenon that the present-day man can describe as frightening and disturbing, which is the depiction of the dead.

The process of photographing took a long time, which made photographing the deceased easier than photographing the living, so at least the photographer becomes absolutely sure that he will not face any movement that spoils his image, at the time of the spread of the phenomenon this method of photography was still in its infancy, so some of the pictures were taken of infants and children The dead kids are probably the only photographs of them. It was a way to challenge death, not by keeping pictures of the living and their lifelike veins and faces blurred, but that challenge meant reminding them of the last situation they found.

The secret of the faces of Fayoum
But centuries before the invention of the Time Stop Machine - the camera - immortalization of faces occurred through drawing or sculpture, and if it came to remembering the dead, we can see the best example in the ancient Egyptian Roman civilization, especially what is called "the faces of Fayyum."

But unlike the portrayal of the Victorians, the faces of Fayyum are vivid images of their owners, people with wide eyes with a deliberate luster of life intentionally similar, but they all have their own features, and those faces have evidence of their creators ’talent in drawing some of the first realistic portraits, perhaps in the history of portraiture .

When Egypt was a Roman province in the year 30 BC, the two civilizations merged culturally and economically, but this mixture can be seen especially in the funerary rituals that we can now call art.

The legacy of the Egyptian mummification overlapped with Roman painting methods, so the result was an integrated ritual for the burial of the embalmed dead inside an elaborate sarcophagus decorated with hieroglyphic inscriptions, but the addition was that that sarcophagus had a face drawn carefully, accurately, and with colors that simulated nature and simulated the features of the dead, according to what is believed.

And it was named the faces of Fayum because most of them were discovered inside a Roman cemetery in Fayoum governorate - 116 kilometers from Cairo - and for years no one knew anything about them, but gradually, from the fifteenth century until the nineteenth century, they were discovered until they reached the number that we know today.

The faces of Fayum are portraits painted on wood planks with materials such as egg tempra, an ancient Egyptian style of painting, or wax mixed with oxides of color, for a deceased person and placed on the front of the sarcophagus that contains his mummy almost in place of the head, and its existence was first discovered by the Italian explorer Pietro della Valle when he Visiting Saqqara in 1615 and transporting some portraits and mummies to Europe.

Egyptians or Greeks?
And for several years before 1887, some explorers found a number of faces in separate areas, until archaeologist Flinders Petrie - in Hawara in Fayoum - found a mass Roman cemetery from which 81 portraits were extracted, which attracted her a huge audience, and in 1892 German archaeologist von Kaufman discovered The so-called Allen Cemetery has three of the most famous faces of mummies so far.

The Egyptians believe that the faces depicted on the wooden panels are for the Greeks Romans, and the Greeks believed the opposite, that it was for the indigenous people of Egypt, when Egypt was a Roman state in which the Greeks, Romans, and Egyptians lived, and members of the Greek army married the country’s indigenous women and there became interracial races.

Painters
But who are the real photographers of those Roman costumes and sumptuous jewelry? There is no accurate answer to the question about the races and races of the owners of the images, but they are definitely from the upper class of soldiers and the wealthy, and there are many coffins that were found without fees on them, so it was concluded that the other is for the owners of the upper class due to the high cost of technicians and raw materials used.

The faces of Fayoum, or as they were called, are a topic full of mystery and there is no clear answer to any of the questions of those interested in art or history. And one of the things that can be speculated, is that those pictures actually depicted their owners? Or have you relied on patterns? Any set of eyes were repeated and little change in their design, a set of hair, noses, and lips.

While it is difficult to say with the above, it is possible to say for sure the effect of these faces on the recipient, each of which undoubtedly has a distinct personality, whether the difference in the look of a particular eye or the touch of a brush has changed the shape of the beard and the direction of the coil of hair, and despite being pictures of people who have already died, its makers tried Striving to inject life into it, especially in the way of drawing shiny eyes or pink lips.

Technical appreciation of the faces of Fayoum

These works can be estimated in an artistic way that is far from its original goal within the burial rites or classification of mummies, as they are evidence of the beginning of realism in portraying faces in addition to stylistic features inspired by ancient Egyptian art as well as Roman and Greek.

Alongside its artistic value stands a historical document of the nature of life and fashion in that period, the quality of jewelry designs, hairdressing styles for men and women, and the types of stones that feed clothing.

On the one hand, it is a history of the clothing style of a group of people at a specific time, but it also defines a certain social and economic class capable of bearing that kind of luxury in appearance.

Fayoum faces have a historical value for art, as it is a transition from Egyptian art, famous for painting on the walls and caves, to painting on separate portable panels bearing multiple layers of colors.

This can be considered as an introduction to the drawing of Coptic icons, and it ended up like the intentions of its creators. It has surpassed the history of its owners and lived until our time in order to blur the line between death and life.