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THE
HELLENIC PORTRAITS
FROM THE FAYUM
AT PRESENT IN THE COLLECTION OF
HERR GRAF

WITH SOME REMARKS ON OTHER WORKS OF THIS CLASS
AT BERLIN AND ELSEWHERE

NEWLY STUDIED AND APPRECIATED
BY
DR. GEORG EBERS

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1893

No. I.— Circular Tomb (Stone).
I : iCX)

PLAN.

SECTION through a. b.

No. 2.— Tomb (Stone).
I : 200

a

PLAN.

SECTION THROUGH a, b.

No. 3.— Tomb (Unburned Bricks).

I : 200

PLAN.

SECTION THROUGH a, b.

THE
HELLENIC PORTRAITS
FROM THE FAYUM
AT PRESENT IN THE COLLECTION OF
HERR GRAF

WITH SOME REMARKS ON OTHER WORKS OF THIS CLASS
AT BERLIN AND ELSEWHERE

NEWLY STUDIED AND APPRECIATED
BY
DR. GEORG EBERS

NEW YORK
D. APPLETON AND COMPANY
1893

Copyright, 1893,
By D. APPLETON AND COMPANY.

Electeotyped and Feinted
AT THE Appleton Press, U.S.A.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

In the spring of 1888 the author of these pages un
dertook the grateful task of introducing to a wider
circle of lovers of art and antiquity certain examples,
then but just arrived in Europe, of ancient Greek
portraits with which a happy accident had made him
familiar before they were known to other experts and
students. These portraits, in fact, merit the consider
ation not merely of the archaeologist and the historian
of art, but of every one interested in painting and its
history; for they fill a gap in its records, and are not
only curiosities of art, but, some of them, true and
thorough works of art, as striking as they are curious,
and appealing to our love of beauty no less than to
our interest in the history of culture and in ethno
graphical research into what may be called the physi
ognomy of nations.
The anticipations I expressed five years ago have
been fully justified — that specialists would, like my
self, undoubtedly devote themselves to a study of
these works, and that artists would find in these re
markable portraits a pleasing surprise, a singular
charm, and perhaps even some unexpected teaching.

4 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
Savants, archaeologists, and anthropologists in Ger
many, France, England, Holland, and Denmark, have
written elaborate reports on these interesting works,
to some extent confirming my assumptions and throw
ing new light on them, though sometimes contesting
them ; and the painters who have examined the pic
tures have not merely heard with the mind's ear the
very voices of long ago and seen how nearly our re
mote ancestors had reached their present level, but
have even learned something from them. The genu
ineness of these paintings, for which I was prepared
to vouch in 1888, after a most careful investigation
has long been placed beyond all doubt.
At an even earlier date we had pointed out certain
wrappings of the dead, discovered in graves of post-
Christian date, as adding in a remarkable degree to our
knowledge of the costume and the textile arts of the
time, referring more especially to the excellent scien
tific dissertation on these relics by Professor Karabacek.
It was a merchant of Vienna, Herr Theodor Graf, who
brought to Europe the very instructive Fayum papyri
which form the nucleus of Archduke Rainer's collec
tion, as well as the tablets from Tell-el-Amarna (for
the most part at Berlin), which must prove of high
value to the study of history, languages, and commerce
in Oriental antiquity ; and the same gentleman's eager
and intelligent enthusiasm for such researches was
successful in securing the collection of paintings here
to be discussed, he having a branch of his business
established in Egypt.
As a good friend of mine, from our school days
together, Herr Graf allowed me to inspect these newly
acquired treasures before they were shown to my col-

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

5

leagues. He brought ten of the pictures to me at
Vevey, where I spent the winter of i887-'88 for the sake
of the mild climate ; of the rest he sent me photographs
coloured by hand, and I may truly say that each con
signment was a fresh and agreeable, nay, a delightful,
surprise. At the present time I have long been famil
iar with the whole series of portraits, and, through
them, with so many different types of humanity of
wonderfully marked individuality. On my return home
I continued the study I had begun in Vevey of these
interesting works, and I here propose to give an
account of the conclusions to which I have been led
as to the place of their origin, as to other monuments
of the same kind with which they must be classed, the
period and conditions of culture to which they owe
their existence, and the peculiarities of these particular
examples.

The Place where the Works were found.
Herr Graf's agents can give us at least some gen
eral information as to the locale of their discovery.
These portraits, like the papyri lately become famous,
were all found in the district now known as the Fayum,
the extensive oasis fertilized by a branch of the Nile
with its numerous channels, which lies beyond the
Libyan mountain range on the west of the great Nile-
Valley, a stretch of pasture and orchard land between
29° and 30° north latitude. A branch line of railway,
dividing from the main line to Upper Egypt at Wasta,
now runs through the heart of the province, which is
famous for the production of sugar cane, vegetables.

6 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
roses, and fruit; * the olive tree also thrives here as it
rarely does in the Nile Valley. Medinet-el-Fayum, the
chief town of the oasis, is at a short distance from the
ruins of Crocodilopolis, known under the Ptolemies as
Arsinoe. This town, as a result of the discovery
among its remains of certain fragments of papyrus,
has recently undergone a sort of resurrection, different
in character but otherwise not less interesting than
that of Pompeii ; for whereas Pompeii was rescued
from oblivion by the pick and spade, the patience and
acumen that have deciphered these half-destroyed lists
of revenues, rolls of accounts, and the like, have made
us so familiar with Arsinoe that we know not merely
its streets, squares, and public buildings, but the num
ber, names, and possessions of the inhabitants of some
of the houses. Much of the life of the citizens lies
before us as in an open book, and records of various
expenses tell us to what festal or other purposes the
revenues even of the temples were applied.
Under the Ptolemies Arsinoe was a considerable
Greek colony ; and even under the Roman emperors it
was still a flourishing provincial town, the most im
portant doubtless of the whole district ; so that when
we learn that the Fayum was the scene of the discov
ery of these pictures a suspicion irresistibly forces
itself upon us that they were executed for the some
time citizens of Arsinoe. But Herr Graf's agents
found them at Rubaiyat near Roda, and on seeking
this place on a map of the Fayum we see that it is
nearly fourteen miles from Arsinoe, so that the inhab-

*The branch line goes past Medinet-el-Fayum, and through the
orchard land to the sugar factory at Abuksa.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 7
itants of that town had to send their dead a consider
able distance, if indeed they were buried at Rubaiyat.
But the character of these portraits proves that they
were painted for the citizens of an important town ;
and though we shall see that at a later period the
Arsinoites seem to have buried their dead in a spot
much nearer home, they must still have clung to the
ancient custom of interment at the edge of the desert,
although it lay at no small distance from the town in
the heart of the garden land. It has long been known
that the Egyptians never laid out cemeteries or erected
funereal monuments in fertile ground. All the build
ings connected with the service of the dead are on the
soil of the desert, and where we find rock tombs they
are in the cliffs of stony and barren hillsides.
Moreover, a Greek inscription engraved by Arrian
— a disciple probably of Epictetus — explicitly tells us:
" The Gods of old formed the towering hilltops,
Stinting with care the corn-bearing meadow land."
But it was not only to economize the arable land
that the Egyptians consigned their burial grounds and
all connected with them to the desert ; it was because,
in the fields washed by the inundation, the mummies,
which above all else must be cherished and preserved,
would have been soaked and destroyed. There is no
reason, therefore, to dispute U. Wilcken's * statement
when he asserts that bodies were brought from so far
as Arsinoe to be buried in the tombs at Rubaiyat. But
they were also used by the inhabitants of another
* U. Wilcken, an article in the Jahrbuch des K. Deutschen
Archaologischen Instituts, iv, 1889, pt. i, p. 4.

g THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
smaller and less known place, namely Kerke (KepK^),
which can have had but little connection with Arsinoe
since it belonged to another government — a circum
stance which makes it not indeed impossible but more
difficult to identify the mummies of Rubaiyat as those
of the citizens of Arsinoe, for extreme and often hos
tile peculiarities divided adjoining districts. To Aby
dos, for instance, the dead were brought from various
nomes, though the often-mentioned " passage of the
corpse to Abydos " may be taken as merely a figure of
speech. Moreover, several of the mummy labels, to
be described presently, tell us that bodies from Phila-
delphos, which was in the government of Arsinoe,
were buried at Kerke, which belonged to that of Mem
phis. And with the portraits wooden tablets have
been found with more or less injured inscriptions, all
recording the fact that the burial ground of Rubaiyat
belonged to the harbor, or landing place (op/tos), of
Kerke,* while on the largest and smallest tablets alike
it is expressly stated that this was within the boundaries
of the nome or government of Memphis.
Thus Memphis, and not Arsinoe, was the chief town
in which the authorities ruling over Kerke resided ;
and this judicial connection is quite intelligible, since
Rubaiyat, which we may regard as its necropolis, lies
on the ridge which forms the natural limit line be
tween the Fayum and the nome of Memphis. It is,
however, hard to reconcile the designation of Kerke
as a harbor or landing place with the present state of
the hydrography of the district ; for Rubaiyat now
* 'El' SpfUf KtpK^ is more correctly rendered at the wharf of
Kerke than in the harbor of Kerke.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. g
lies in a spot but sparingly irrigated by one of the
narrow channels known locally as Bats, and its still
narrower side streams ; this is, in fact, a canal from
the Bahr-Jusuf (or Joseph's channel) which supplies
the whole of the Fayum with water. Whether Wadi
Wardane, discovered and mapped by Linant de Belle-
fonds, was ever navigable in ancient times, making
Kerke a practicable shipping place, can no longer be
decided ; but according to Stadler, the present gov
ernment entertains a project for making it available as
a water way through the province. It was to be ex
pected that few traces should be visible of the net
work of canals which formerly gave the Fayum its fer
tility. It has undergone many great changes even
within the period between the survey of the French
engineers under Napoleon (Description de I'Egypte)
and that made a few years since, as shown in Schwein-
furth's map. The statement that Kerke, near the
modern Rubaiyat, was a river port, and, as we learn
from our portraits, a place of some importance, is cal
culated to throw fresh light on a much disputed mat
ter, the irrigation and water ways of the Fayum in an
cient times. Kerke, too, perhaps, was one of the older
towns of Egypt, for on the ridge to the east, within
less than two hours' camel ride from Rubaiyat, the re
mains of a pyramid have been found quite unconnect
ed with the necropolis of Memphis.
Besides the wooden tablets * discovered with the
portraits, two hitherto unpublished Greek ostraca men
tion the town of Kerke. These were communicated
to me by the kindness of Prof. Wilcken. They were
* The tablets were name labels attached to mummies.

IO THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
found on the hill of Sedment, which divides the Fayum
from what was the government of Herakleopolis, at
about eight hours' camel ride from Rubaiyat.*
The most interesting of the Greek documents in
which mention is made of this place is that on the
second wooden mummy label from Rubaiyat ; it can
only be interpreted as meaning that an individual,
whose name is unfortunately lost, after living in the
village of Philadelphos, was brought after death to the
port or landing place at Kerke, where evidently a
large cemetery existed.

Mummy Cases with Portraits. — The Berlin Col
lection. — The Structure of the Tombs,
and what it proves.
Memorials which must be generally classified with
these portraits are in the wider sense numerous ; in a
narrower sense they are rare.
It was from early times a practice among the
heathen Egyptians to place an effigy of the deceased
outside the case which contained the mummy ; but in
remote ages this was not a portrait painted on the
mummy case, but a molded mask decorating the head
* He also points out the name Kerke in two composite names —
Kerkesouchos, the dwelling of Sebak, the crocodile-god, and Ker-
kasoros (Herodotus ii, 15), the place where the Nile is said to have
divided into the Canopic and Pelusiac branches. Thus the old ren
dering " the dividing of Osiris " must be abandoned ; the name
must read Kerkeusiris (KepKeiicripis), and be interpreted as " the dwell
ing of Osiris."— Zeitschr'ift fUr agyptische Sprache und Alt^rthums-
kunde, Berlin, 1883, p. 162.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. n
end of it. The hands, too, were not infrequently
modeled, while the lid of the case itself was shaped in
imitation of the swathed corpse, all in one, the legs
undivided, with a slight elevation over the feet. Such
sarcophagi exist made of various kinds of stone, of
wood, and most frequently of a sort of papier-macM,
which the ancient Egyptians prepared with masterly
skill ; and this form was so highly admired among
neighboring nations that the Phoenicians, for instance,
adopted it, as is proved by the Phoenician sarcophagi
brought to Paris by Renan — among them that of the
famous king Eschmunazar — and by those discovered
at Saida (Sidon) in 1887.
On the papier-mache mummy cases of this shape,
which, as we shall presently see, assumed from the
ninth century a quite peculiar form, the portrait mask
of the deceased was heightened by color ; still, though
we find among these some very marked and character
istic modeled faces, they are all treated with the strict
ly symmetrical flatness of feature that distinguishes
this class of Egyptian art. Mummy cases like these
from Rubaiyat, on which portraits on linen or wood
are inserted at the head end instead of molded masks,
are, on the other hand, rare. There are two preserved
in the Egyptian collection at Dresden, others in the
cabinet of coins at the Paris Library, and again oth
ers, reproduced by Gayet, in the Bulak Museum near
Cairo. There are two (now numbered provisionally as 24
and 25) in the Berlin Museum. On these the portraits
are painted on the linen cover.
We are more especially concerned here with those
.specimens where the portrait of the deceased was

12 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
painted on wood and attached to the mummy case.
We will presently return to the consideration of the
painted wrappers preserved at Berlin.
Six more portraits of the same kind as Herr Graf's
were acquired for the Louvre from the Clot-Be collec
tion ; there are others in the British ^[useum and the
National Gallery, London, and in the Berlin Museum.
Since Mr. Flinders Petrie, the English antiquary, un
dertook his excavations in the Fayum, bringing to
light a rather considerable number of portrait mum
my cases, several similar works have passed into the
Bulak Museum, the British Museum, the Peel Park
Museum, Manchester, and others.
As it has unfortunately been impossible for me to
inspect the Berlin specimens myself before printing
this pamphlet, Herr Professor Erman, the enlightened
director of the museum, has been good enough to de
scribe them. There are four-and-twenty portraits,
several still attached to the mummy case, and some of
them remarkably fine examples. Particularly note
worthy is No. I, representing a powerful man with
negro blood in his veins ; the hair and beard are wool
ly, the lips thick. The expression of the face is rather
stupid, and the subject wears neither robe nor orna
ments. The portrait, however, is capitally painted.
No. I was perhaps the favorite servant of some rich
man, who had the portrait done for him.
No. 2, still attached to the mummy, which was dis
interred with others by H. Brugsch in 1892, has fea
tures of an unmistakably Semitic cast. The complex
ion is light, the hair very black ^d curly. The pub
lic call him by Jewish names.
Among the Graf collection there are six of men

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 13
and two of women, of which the originals must have
been Semitic, as any one can see. These are Nos. 5,
6, 7 (this one not only on the evidence of the fea
tures), 20, 44, 49, portraits of men; Nos. 11, 12, por
traits of women.
But to return to the Berlin examples. No. 7 is
particularly interesting, and all the group belonging
to it ; they were discovered at Hawara, in March, 1892,
by Professor Kaufmann and his companions, among
them Major von Wissman and Dr. H. Seidel, of Bruns
wick. These are a mother, a father, and three chil
dren — a baby, a child of about three, and a girl of six.
The mummy of this little maiden, which Dr. Seidel
presented to the museum, was, like her father's, deco
rated with a golden mask ; the mother's portrait was
painted on a wooden tablet, and a tombstone found
near her body bore an inscription.* The lady must
have been a woman of wealth and splendid tastes.
The public, it is said, believed that she was the be
dizened wife of a butcher, but the fine pearls round her
throat indicate that she was of high rank. She is also
known as the Lady Aline, and her name, in fact, was
Alinei, or, if we take off the final /, Aline.

* As follows :
AAINHI
H KAI TSNcdC
HpcuAOYXpH
CTHXAiperrOAAA eTOYC I Ae L
MecopH 2

Akivrji
¦rj Kotj, TevctfS
(TT^ Xoiipe TToWa

A.£ L {eT&v 35)

tTOVS I (^SiKOLTOVJ
liecropi^ 7.
(rjfuipa hrraia)
The reconstruction of the data on which the translation is based
is given by Professor Wilcken.
2

14 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
The inscription on the stone may be rendered :
Alinei
Also called Tenos
Herod's daughter
Thou good one
A tender farewell*
The year lo )
Mesoreh 7th j ^^^ ^^
That is to say, in the tenth year of the reign of
some regent or emperor, on the seventh of the Egyp
tian month Mesoreh — which corresponded to the
month from the 17th of June to the i6th of July.
Mesoreh 7th would be June 22d.
The deceased was then the daughter of a Herod.
Neither the name Alinei . nor the second name Tenos
occurs elsewhere, but there are other Graeco-Egyptian
names terminating in rji. We are at once reminded of
Alineh, and supposed it to De a Greek feminine form
of the Semitic name Ali (in Hebrew >fpy). The Se
mitic form for the feminine would be Alijat or Alijah.
The modern German name Aline is a derivative from
the Arabic Ali — the High One. The inscription un
fortunately gives no exact information, through either
the date or name, as to the position of the lady and
her husband, or the time when they lived. She too,
perhaps, was of Semitic race. The words " the year
IO " no doubt refer to~The reign of some Roman em
peror. * Xpria-T6s is frequently addressed to the dead. iroAA(i is added
to emphasize X'"P^- It frequently occurs in the address of a letter :

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

15

The uncial letters here employed add to the diffi
culties of the chronology, on palaeographic grounds.
The merit of the painting may be accounted for by the
wealth of the sitter, who could have herself depicted
by an artist of high pretensions.
The portrait mummy cases at Dresden and at Bulak
are of the same character as the two at Berlin. Those
found at Achmim, and preserved — so far as they have
not crumbled to dust — in the Bulak Museum, have
portraits painted on a thin layer of stucco.
We have here made mention of these mummies to
show the way in which the dead were remembered at
the period when the portrait mummies were made, and
also to be able to refer to them without further break
in the course of this essay.
We now know more details of the tombs at Rubai
yat and of how they were discovered, for that portion
of the Fayum which immediately surrounds the spot
has been mapped by an Austrian engineer, Herr Stad
ler, and the sites sketched of some of the tombs.
From his account, and from Schweinfurth's map
of 1886, it may be seen that the Bas canal, starting
from the Bahr-Jusuf, connects Medinet-el-Fayum (the
ancient Crocodilopolis or Arsinoe) by a loop with
the Birket-el-Qerun, the largest lake in the district.
After running northward for about twenty kilometres
(twelve and a half miles) it expands into a small lake,
at the northern side of which stands Tamieh. On the
southern side stands the village of Roda, and at a kilo
metre (five eighths of a mile) to the southeast is Ru
baiyat. The ground where the portrait mummies were
found does not now form part of the cultivated land,

1 6 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
but is a good deal to the east, on the western side
of the bare ridge which divides the field and garden
land on the Libyan (left or western) side of the Nile
from the oasis of the Faijum. Stadler's map here
shows an extensive mass of ruins which no doubt
mark the site of the ancient Kerke. To the east of
these lies the necropolis within whose precincts Herr
Graf's portraits, mummy cases, and labels were dis
covered.* The idea that they had been found in rock tombs
* Stadler's account is as follows : At six kilometres to the south
east of this village — Rubaiyat — the oasis is bounded by a strip of
desert lying between the Fayum and the Nile Valley. If we turn
due southward, toward the interior of this strip of desert, the prac
ticed eye will discern the remains of a very extensive town. An
enormous number of broken potsherds bear unmistakable witness to
its former populousness. By tracing this stream of pottery for about
five kilometres in a southerly direction, toward the range of hills
which marks the limits of the province, we are led to the opened
tombs whence Herr Grafs pictures were brought. The writer could
still obtain a few from the same site. These tombs are not hewed in
the rock, but constructed on the sandy soil of the desert, of limestone
without any kind of cement, or of unburned bricks. They display a
great variety of form and distribution. The accompanying plans
will help to give an idea of them. The Bedouin Arabs, in digging
for salt, came upon one of these tombs and several gilt sarcophagi
with portraits of the deceased at the upper (head) end. These were
not painted on the mummy case itself, but inserted, apparently to
admit of their removal at any time to uncover the face of the dead.
All the portraits discovered, even those of the mummies found after
ward, were regarded as worthless by the workmen, and sold by them
in the first instance to a Greek dealer in antiquities. What became
of- the cases, cloths, and ornaments from the plundered mummies
was and remains a secret. The cases and wrappers were probably
burned to avoid detection by the authorities, who would haveclaimed
all treasure trove.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

17

proved ill founded ; they were discovered some under
the sand of the necropolis and some in graves.
The most remarkable, indeed, of these tombs were
not hewed out of the rock, but independent erections
destined to contain the bodies of a whole family.
Stadler gives drawings to scale of three of the best
preserved. Two are rectangular, the third is cylin
drical, the ground plan being, of course, circular. The
first two are entered by a flight of steps on one side.
In No. II this leads directly into a square central
chamber, from which, on the three sides where there
are no steps, open two long passages with side cells
toward the middle and at the end. In No. Ill the
steps lead to a passage with six cells on either hand
and three at the end. The entrance of these three
faces the steps. In No. I, the cylindrical tomb, a pas
sage with a square chamber on each side, leads to a
round hall, from which radiate seven cells for the re
ception of mummy cases. Nos. I and II are covered
in with a pointed roof of triangular section ; they are
built of stone. No. Ill is of unburned bricks, and has
cells for fifteen bodies ; II is constructed for ten, and
I for eleven mummies.
These forms of structure are not ancient Egyptian.
There are, indeed, some rock tombs arranged within
like No. II, but in none, excepting some of the old
empire, discovered by Maspero at Sakkarah in 1881 —
built tombs, not rock tombs — are the chambers so nar
row, or constructed to receive single bodies ; in Phar-
aonic times these were placed in one of the divisions
of the shaft cut off from the tomb. No. Ill reminds
us in its arrangement of the tombs of Apis at Sakkarah,
but these were hewed out of the rock. No. I, with its

ig THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
circular plan, has no fellow in all Egypt, excepting in
one place in the Fayum. It was G. Schweinfurth who
found some cylindrical tombs in the southwest part of
the district, at about twenty kilometres (twelve and a
half miles) from Arsinoe and forty (twenty-five miles)
from Rubaiyat, a little to the northwest of Rharakh,
near Medinet-Mahdi. These measure between three
and four metres in diameter and in height, and are built
of blocks of limestone, looking like round towers.
They were unfortunately so chokeful of Nile mud that
Schweinfurth could not investigate their contents. He
supposed that they had been erected over the opening
of the vertical well, to protect the grave beneath. In
our No. I all the cells to contain the mummies are
horizontal, and the section of the tower is twice as
large as that of the tomb at Medinet-Mahdi, being
eight metres in diameter. May it not have been used
as a granary, like those of which the Rhind papyrus
gives a mathematical calculation of capacity ?
If we now inquire what class of tomb is nearest in
style to the mausoleums of Rubaiyat, the answer must
be, certain rock tombs in Palestine and Phoenicia. At
Rome too, no doubt, there were tombs standing de
tached, with several chambers for the bodies of a
whole gens. But the columbaria, with niches for cin
erary urns, have also some resemblance to those under
discussion ; and while the tombs — often designated as
cBterna dotnus — frequently assumed the aspect of a
house or a temple, even the round sepulchres — of
which that of Cecilia Metella, which, however, has a
rectangular base, that of the Servilia, Virgil's tomb,
and the Sepolcro Rotundo at Pompeii, are the best
known examples — show a different internal arrange-

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. ig
ment from that we find here. The same may be said
of Greek tombs. Now, although the Hebrew and
Phoenician tombs of which mention has been made are
hewed out in the rock, their internal distribution has a
decided resemblance to that of the built tombs of Ru
baiyat. The cells in these precisely resemble in ap
pearance the Kokim in the Hebrew rock tombs which
Titus Tobler very aptly called shelf tombs (or, more
exactly, pigeonhole tombs). We refer more especially
to the family tomb of Queen Helena at Adiabene, now
called the King's tomb, and the rock tomb wrongly
designated as the tomb of the Judges, with another of
the same type at Saida.
The tombs of Kerke, of which the sketch lies before
me, contain chambers for only thirty-six mummies,
whereas the remains of hundreds have been found; it
would therefore be rash to come to any general con
clusions from the internal arrangement of three remain
ing tombs as to the whole necropolis, in which there
are said to be vast numbers of ruined sepulchres, or to
assert that it was one of those burial grounds which
the Jews were wont to use after the dispersion ; while
the Greeks and Romans did not generally bury their
dead in cemeteries, but when they were rich enough
erected tombs as separate structures where they could
find a suitable site. They may in Egypt have accom
modated themselves to the custom of the country, still
it is hard to believe that any Roman or Greek sepulchre
was ever constructed on a Hebrew or Phoenician plan.
The hypothesis that hereditary tombs were erected in
the necropolis of Kerke by some wealthy Hebrew or
Phoenician families who may have been of the highest
rank, is strongly supported by the aspect of the por-

20 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
traits discovered here ; for, as we shall see, they repre
sent several men of Semitic race, one apparently a
high priest of Baal or the priest's son. And the dis
covery of portraits in a Jewish cemetery on a Semitic
mummy case is not at all surprising when we remem
ber how persistently the Hebrews of Alexandria strove
to imitate the Greeks in every particular. In the Jew-'
ish catacombs which have been excavated in the Ron-
danini vineyard by the Via Appia at Rome there are
numerous examples of sculpture in which human fig
ures occur — hunters, children, and others.
This, however, means no more than that in the
necropolis of Kerke a certain number of tombs be
longing to Semitic families seem to have been found ;
the great majority of the other ruined sepulchres,
which, according to Stadler's map, extend to some
considerable distance eastward in the desert, seem to
have been those of the Hellenistic inhabitants of the
Fayum, without any distinction of race. By far the
greater number show other than Semitic types, so we,
may sum up the facts in the statement that the ne
cropolis of Rubaiyat was chiefly used by Hellenic
Greeks, but, as it would seem, was also open to the
higher rank of Semitic families in the province.

The Two Principal Classes of Portrait Mummies;
their Appearance, Origin, and Epigraphs.
The mummy portraits known before the discovery
of Herr Graf's, of those found by Mr. Flinders Petrie,
and of the examples in the Berlin Museum, are not to
be mentioned in the same dav.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 2 1
The portrait mummies at Dresden, Bulak, Paris,
and elsewhere are nearly allied to one group of the
Rubaiyat mummies ; for, associated with those which
had a wooden panel attached to the wrapper over the
face with the portrait of the dead, some were found
there which,- like those at Dresden and Bulak, had the
portrait painted on the linen outer wrapper itself. In
1888 not a single body that had been deposited at
Rubaiyat had been met with uninjured; all had been
mutilated and plundered in ancient or modern times.
Most of the wooden panels had been torn from the
mummies and dragged out of the sand separately;
now, on the contrary, besides those mentioned above,
several mummies have been discovered also in the
Fayum. Of these, many have been brought to Eng
land by Mr. Flinders Petrie, and a few, more lately dis
interred, have come into the possession of Herr Graf,
giving us an excellent idea of their appearance in an
uninjured condition. Herr Graf has also forwarded to
me two linen mummy wrappers from Rubaiyat resem
bling those at Dresden, Bulak, and Berlin. These are
on the whole similar to the papier-macM mummy cases
of the Pharaonic period, only the decoration which on
those is in relief, on these is painted. A thick stratum
of linen covers the upper side of the mummy like a lid,
and over the face of the body a portrait of the deceased
is painted in colors ; the hands and feet are likewise
represented in their proper place. The right hand of
the male portrait mummy at Dresden holds a vase for
libations ; and the left, one of those garlands* which we
* This, at any rate, is what seems to be intended. A picture from
Pompeii suggests that it is a wreath of flowers rather than a woolen

22 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
also occasionally see in our portraits. In the portrait
of a woman (Graf coll.. No. 9) she, like the Dresden
mummy, holds not indeed a vase, but a cup. The
head of the Dresden male mummy seems to repose on
a blue-tinted cloth, and the painter has placed by his
side the red and gold fillets of the dead, which we shall
see again in the portraits on panel. Besides these he
has represented some of the flowers which were actu
ally found on several mummies from Der-el-Bahri, so
well preserved that Schweinfurth was able to identify
the species. The dress of the portrait is also indicated
in color, but only over the breast, where the hands lie,
and just about the feet, on which are sandals. The
body and legs are enveloped in a perfectly conven
tional rigid casing, diapered with richly gilt ornaments
representing various well-known heathen Egyptian
figures to which magic powers were ascribed, and
which display the degraded, or rather derivative, forms
which often characterize them in work of a late period.*
fillet. This is the charming picture with flowers and Loves, en
graved by F. and F. Nicolini (Le case e Monumenti di Pompeii,
Pantheon Tav. iii, 3) ; (See also Helbig, Wandgemalde der Stadte
in Kampanien, No. 799). Nicolini calls the long garlands of flowers
to which we refer " treccie di fiori."
* There are two mummies with painted faces, hands, and feet of
precisely similar type in the Bulak Museum, Nos. 5613 and 5614 ;
they are well represented in color in Gayet, Monumentes Copies,
Tab. A and B ; Mission Archeologique frangaise au Caire, Tom. iii,
Paris, 1889 ; also at Berlin, Nos. 24 and 25, in which the portraits
are painted on a linen wrapper covered with small gold ornaments.
Professor A. Erman writes with reference to No. 25 : "A young woman
with handsome ornaments. The right hand holds a golden vessel ;
with the left she plays with her necklace, which she holds by one
finger. Somewhat stiff, but very pleasing."

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 23
The Proceedings of the Dresden Museum, which I
was enabled to consult by the kindness of the director,
Herr Treu, inform us that the Dresden portrait mum
mies were not brought from Rubaiyat-Kerke, though,
indeed, from the nome of Memphis; for Pietro della
Valle took them, in 1645, "out of the hypogcea of
Sakkarah." M. Gaston Maspero has obligingly in
formed me that those at Bulak are from the same
locality. With them many more were found which
crumbled to dust in the process of removal.
The portrait mummies of Achmim form a distinct
class. The deceased are represented on the stucco
cases which inclose them ; the men dressed in the toga,
with flowers or an olive branch on their head ; the
women in the tunic and peplos, and with leather shoes.
It is not known whence Nos. 24 and 25 in the Ber
lin Museum were brought; one of the London por
traits, however, undoubtedly came from Memphis.
With regard to those in the Louvre, it was supposed
from a notice on them by Champollion that they were
portraits of certain members of the family of Pollius
Soter, an archon of Thebes, who lived in the time of
Hadrian ; but U. Wilcken has shown that these pictures
do not belong to the six mummy cases, also preserved
at Paris, in which some members of his illustrious fam
ily were undoubtedly buried, his name and theirs being
well known to us by (ireek inscriptions. Hence the por
traits are by no means so certainly of the time of Ha
drian as are the coffins, with which they have indeed
absolutely no connection, and they can not therefore
be taken for chronological data. The Berlin Museum,
on the other hand, possesses two coffins at the bottom
of which there is, in each, a full-length painted figure

24

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

of a little girl. These portraits represent two daugh
ters of this same Soter, and consequently belong to
the second century after Christ.
But the mummies were furnished with portrait pan
els far more often than with painted images. The
reader as he recalls some mediaeval tomb can doubt
less remember that on its top or its cover a figure
rested of a knight in armor or a prelate. If he im
agines this as painted instead of carved, with the face
only, or, not unfrequently, the hands too, carefully
depicted, while the body is hidden from view by thick
wrappings, he will understand what is meant by a
mummy case. Indeed, this class of art is not altogeth
er unknown to our time. For example, in the mag
nificent mausoleum of Charlottenburg the master hand
of Rauch carved from the marble a royal couple rest
ing as on a couch ; and in the chapel of St. Katharine,
in the Monastery of the Transfiguration at the foot of
Sinai, there is a silver sarcophagus, a gift from the
Czar of Russia, in which to preserve the relics of her
bones, with the sleeping extended figure of the saint in
marble on the lid. Such effigies of saints are often
seen in Russia. In the portrait mummies of Rubai
yat we find, over the spot where we should seek the
face of the dead, a wooden panel with the likeness
of it. The portrait (Graf coll.. No', i) and the mummy
No. 94 (see page 25) show us how these pictures were
attached. They were glued to the wrapper inclos
ing the body ; to secure them against possible loss, a
linen band was wound like a frame round and over
the edges of the panel. This framing, too, was glued
both to the wood and to the mummy. The Paris por-

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

25

portrait-mummy, complete.
Graf coll. No. 94.

26 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
trait of the daughter of Dioscoros* shows us how the
pictures were surrounded with ornaments to harmo
nize with the rest of the decoration on the upper side
of the mummy case.
And now, since these lines were written, the unin
jured portrait mummies were discovered which allow
of our describing them not with the aid of imagination
but with the objects themselves before our eyes. One
in the possession of Herr Graf (No. 94) is so skillfully
swathed with crossed bands that they form squares,
giving the outside of the mummy the effect of an old
Roman coffered ceiling ; the angles of the squares are
again crossed by horizontal bands. The panel with
the portrait is held in its place by strips of linen, but
asphalt and other tenacious materials have been used
to keep it from slipping from its place. Schweinfurth
was present when Flinders-Petrie extracted some por
trait mummies from the sand at Hawara, and on sev
eral of these the pictures were attached by actual
frames instead of mere linen bandaging. These frames
were made of a sort of papier-macM cartonnage, thick
ly gilt ; some were oval, some of an open horseshoe
form.f Among these again may be included the mummy,
* This portrait was very remarkably restored, for originally one
half of it found its way to London and the other half to Paris.
f The portrait (No. i in the Berlin coll.) of a powerful-looking
man of negro type, with no drapery or ornaments, is still attached to
the mummy ; so, too, is No. 3, a young man with a slight beard. We
have already spoken of the group (Berlin, Nos. 7, 8, 9), consisting
of the lady Alinei, her husband and children. The little girl and
her father have gold masks instead of portraits. These were found
in the necropolis of Hawara.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

27

also discovered by Petrie, and presented by Mr. Jesse
Howorth to the Peel Park Museum at Manchester.
This mummy, which is quite uninjured, is incased in
cartonnage still heavily gilt in many places, and over
the face is a portrait of the dead perfectly correspond
ing to those in the Graf collection, representing a boy
of fourteen or fifteen, with dark curling hair, thick
black eyebrows, and full lips. It is surrounded by a
picture frame, in the modern sense of the word, intend
ed to conceal the junction of the picture with the mum
my. On it an ornamental decoration of vine-leaves
and grapes is beautifully executed and richly gilt. We
shall return to a consideration of this and the other
patterns on g\\\. papier-mache cz.%&'a.
Many of these mummies were sent to the necropolis
furnished with labels to prevent mistakes and confu
sion. Several of these wooden tickets are no doubt
from Rubaiyat. Some others are in the collection of
Archduke Rainer at Vienna, and twenty-five were pub
lished by Le Blant (Rev. Archeologique, nouv. ser.
28, 29). On these labels are preserved the names of
many mummified Graeco-Egyptians, while on the
mummies themselves only transcribed words and texts
have hitherto been found. We will presently consider
the Semitic names on No. 7 in the Graf collection.
We have already learned those on the tombstone ex
tracted from the sand with the Berlin portrait No. 7.
Another, in Greek, was found on the broken panel No.
95. On this, with a painting of a boy's neck and about
a third of the face with the left eye, is the word
ASKAHniAAH(S) ('Ao-KXTjirtaSrys), that is, Asklepiades,
and beneath it LH evi/fu^') = " eight years old, have
courage ! " The final sigma of the name is half broken,

28 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
but was no doubt complete. The portrait, though
wearing a chain, is that of a boy. If the name were
written Asklepiade it must be rendered as the voca
tive of Asklepiades.
Wilcken ascribes the writing to the second century
A. D., and the inferior style of the picture would lead
us to the same conclusion. On the Dresden mummy
we read the same words as after the name Asklepiades
on No. 95. It was merely a loving farewell greeting
written by a survivor on the linen outer wrapper.
From the analogy of many instances we can only read
it as evij/vxi. = evxjnixu. It was employed by the Greeks
in Egypt exactly in the same sense as x<*'P^ by other
Greeks. " Be of good courage, bear thyself bravely."
This is its cry to the departed heathen, and at a later
period to the departed Christian. We have it again on
the picture of the daughter of Dioscoros above men
tioned. This portrait, at Paris, bears the inscription
Atoo-Kopou emj/vxi = " Daughter of Dioscoros, have cour
age!" Thus, even in a foreign land, the Hellenic
Egyptians preserved the familiar form eupsychi instead
of eupsychei, as we may see from the inscription on
the tomb of an Alexandrian buried at Mitylene.

The Execution of the Pictures, what they rep
resent, AND how they came TO BE ATTACHED
TO Mummies.
The execution of these portraits is in every in
stance the same, though their artistic merit varies to
an extraordinary degree. They are painted on wooden
panels of various thickness. The thickest are for the

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 29
most part of sycamore wood, the thin of cypress. They
have not been sawed, but hewed with a pick-formed
axe, such as may be seen represented on the monu
ments, and in use to this day in Egypt. They are for
the most part from thirty to forty centimetres high,
and about eighteen centimetres wide (from twelve to
fourteen inches by about seven). In many cases linen
is stretched over the panel, and the picture painted on
that. The painting is sometimes executed in wax colors
by an encaustic process, sometimes in tempera, and
sometimes in a mixture of the two. Of encaustic and
the methods of its use we knew but little until lately;
in fact, two otherwise very sound investigators, Henry
Cros and Charles Henri, had formed quite erroneous
views as to this method of painting as practiced by the
ancients, and their errors found wide acceptance. It
was Donner von Richter, himself an esteemed artist,
who first discovered the processes employed in encaus
tic painting, and even executed some pictures by them.
We can but refer the reader to his capital treatise,
which relieves us of the task of going into the ques
tion.* The colors treated by this technique seem to
have acquired great brilliancy, and the painting very
great permanence, such as our oil colors possess in a
much less degree, as we see from these pictures.
I have before me abopt ninety portraits. Most of
them show only the head and bust, without the hands,
* Otto Donner von Richter : Ueber Technisches in der Malerei
der Alten, ins besondere in deren Enkaustik. Praktische und chem.-
tech. Mittheilungen fiir Malerei, etc. A. Klein, Munich, 1885, No.
10 ff. Also, by the same : Die enkaustische Malerei der Alten,
AUgem. Zeitung, Beilage 1888, No. 180.
3

30 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
but these are also included in some instances. There
is about an equal number of each sex, and most of the
ages of human life are represented, bright-eyed and
with strongly individualized features, old men, middle-
aged men, lads and boys, girls, young women, and
matrons. The greater number are in the prime of life;
the oldest of the female heads is not more than fifty;
of the men, not past sixty. Heydemann pointed out
that the mummy labels published by Le Blant, on which
the ages of the deceased are recorded, bear witness to
the same fact, for half of all the buried persons men
tioned on the labels died between the ages of twenty
and forty. Was the mortality in the prime of life really
so great in Egypt at that period, or have we a peculiar
case to deal with, or were labels only attached to the
mummies that had portraits ? The circumstance is
certainly startling when we reflect that death is usually
busiest among those of the ages here most rarely rep
resented. How often, and how suddenly, is the tender
blossom plucked of infant life ! how many aged men
and women sink into the grave ! and yet we here meet
with only three old men, and look in vain for any por
traits of young children and old women. As to infants,
it may well be that they were regarded as unworthy of
being painted and of the attendant expense; and the
Greek feeling for beauty seems to have had a preju
dice, though often an unjust one, against the present
ment of the withered features of an old woman, while
the artist was content to paint the expressive counte
nance of at least one elderly man. The same fact is
observable in the portraits preserved at Paris, London,
Berlin, and Bulak ; they all represent men and women
in youth or middle age. Among the Berlin pictures

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 31
only No. 12 represents an old face, and that the face
of a woman.
The question now arises. What are we to think was
the origin of the portraits, and their connection with
the mummies ?
Three alternatives suggest themselves : First, the
painter may have used the corpse as a model and have
endeavored to give it the semblance of life. Second,
the Graeco-Egyptians may have been accustomed to
have their portraits taken in the prime of life, and
the pictures, after long adorning the family living-
room, were attached, frame and all, to the mummies
after death. Third, the portrait may have been
painted and hung up during life, and then a copy of it
made to be consigned to the tomb. To the first
hypothesis, as Wilcken pointed out, the chief objection
is the " convincingly lifelike aspect " of the heads.
The very expression of the eyes is full of individuality ;
the coloring is of unmistakable fidelity. The models
from which these portraits were painted can not have
been the faces of the dead !
It is indeed extremely probable that the houses of
Egyptian Greeks should have been ornamented with
portraits of members of the family; even under the
Pharaohs the great personages of the realm had por
trait statues executed during the lifetime of the model,
to be subsequently placed in his tomb. Whether they
ever had portraits taken for the purpose of house dec
oration we know not, for none have been preserved.
Among the remains of mural paintings in Campania,
on the other hand — which, as Helbig has shown, bear
much resemblance to the Alexandrian work — there are
several family portraits. In Pompeii they were painted

32 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
in fresco on the walls ; and in Egypt they may have
been executed in the same way ; at the same time it is
possible that portraits were preferred painted on
wooden panels, and then inserted in the walls, or else
framed, as we find them on some mummies, and hung
up. There is ample evidence as to easel paintings by
Alexandrian artists. They were an article of commerce,
and Heydemann refers with much aptness to the
tabulce, or picture tablets, of their master Epicurus,
which Epicureans were wont to purchase (Cicero de
fin. No. i), and Christians of the Saviour and of the
apostles Peter and Paul (Eusebius, Hist. Eccles., vii,
i8). It only remains to be decided whether a portrait
already extant was copied for the tomb, or whether it
was simply removed from its place in the home and
attached to the mummy case. A circumstance which
makes the latter alternative appear probable has been
communicated to me by Herr Richter, the engineer —
Herr Graf's friend and representative. It is, that on
the back of certain of the portraits there is a layer of
plaster some millimetres in thickness, on which patches
remain of the asphaltum by which they were glued to
the mummies. Others again have holes, looking as
though they had been pierced by a nail.* Is this plas
ter a portion of the wall of the room into which the
picture had been inserted, and was the hole left by the
peg by which it was fastened up ? Were they deposed
from their original purpose after the death of the per-
* An article on the Graf collection in the Kolnische Zeitung
also expresses the view that the portraits had been taken down from
the living-rooms.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

33

son depicted, to deck the tomb instead of the home ?
An argument on this side is to be found in the small
dimensions of No. 32, the likeness of a young girl,
which is so diminutive that it can scarcely have been
painted expressly to adorn a mummy. A picture exe
cuted for this purpose would more probably have cor
responded with the real proportions of the body to
which it belonged. This portrait, therefore, most likely
fulfilled some other purpose before it was attached to
the mummy.
Still, if No. 32 was actually reft from the wall of a
room, we are met by the question, how the space in
the wall was filled up when the picture was removed —
plaster and all sometimes, as we have seen — and were
the greater number of these paintings, which fit the
mummies so well, executed in the first instance for the
home, but with an ulterior view to their subsequent
use ? It is not a pleasant suggestion. Nor must we
forget the portraits at Pompeii painted on the wall of
the tablinum. Why assume such discrepancy in the
case, when in other respects there is so much agree
ment ? Still, it is hard to believe that the worst of
these pictures were executed for the adornment of a
room. The panel, again, which is painted on both sides,
is a picture which could not in any case have been
taken from a wall. And the same is true of No. 7,
with the Aramaic names, etc., on the back.
I am more inclined to believe that the Hellenic
Egyptians were wont to be painted in the prime of life,
to place the picture in the family living-room, and
then, after the death of the person represented, an
artist was commissioned to copy it for the mummy.
Thus, when a woman died at an advanced age the por-

34

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

trait placed with the body showed her in her bloom; as
we often see the memoirs of a lady of importance who
may have lived to a great age illustrated by a picture
of her in her youth. Only the wealthy would have em
ployed the best artists for such work. It seems to me
that many things are thus accounted for, and especially
the style of execution of the less good portraits in the
Graf collection. At the same time this does not ex
clude the possibility that under certain circumstances
a portrait may have been removed for the purpose
from the wall of a room. Indeed, it seems probable in
the case of No. 32, and of some others. Three of the
coarsest workmanship are perhaps not portraits at all,
but, as Wilcken indeed surmised, turned out from a
factory of such paintings. They remind us of the pic
tures of a soldier — any soldier, in the uniform of a
certain regiment — which our gallant warriors were
wont to send home as portraits of themselves before
photography became universal. Even in the time of
the Pharaohs manufactured articles all of a pattern
must have been employed, when the lack of means pro
hibited the expense of a portrait statue or of a portion
of the Book of the Dead expressly written out for the
deceased. Most of the persons represented seemed to have
belonged to the upper — nay, to the highest — class ; for
many of the men wear aristocratic vestments, with
laurel wreaths or gold fillets on the head ; the women,
for the most part, have ornaments, and in some cases
goldsmith's work, sometimes of great value.
We know, with regard to the before-named Berlin
examples, that they belonged to the members of an
archon's family who were certainly highly respected

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 35
in their native circle ; still I can not make up my mind
to agree with H. Henry in regarding the bracelike
band which is worn across the shoulder and breast in
some of the portraits (in the Graf and Paris collec
tions and elsewhere) as the laticlavus — that is, a pur
ple stripe which was worn on the robe by senators,
and in imperial times by the sons of old patrician fam
ilies and military tribunes of the rank of knights.
The position held by so many of these provincial Egyp
tians can not have been high enough for this, and sev
eral of the female portraits show similar bands, which,
indeed, are but seldom purple, and never represented
as a border or hem. They must probably be intended
for some peculiar form of mummy band, as may best be
seen in Nos. 53 and 66, where the old man and youth
wear plain sack-shaped shrouds, and these bands hang
over each shoulder and over the breast exactly ]ike
loose braces. They are also to be seen in the fine
portrait of a boy. No. 47.*

The Ethnical Type of Most of the Portraits,
AND A Glance at the Greek Colony of Arsi
noe, WHENCE so many HAVE BEEN BROUGHT.
If we now consider the whole of these pictures as a
class, we do not find many which can be referred to
the ethnological type that is known to us as essen-
* Red bands similar to these were not unknown to the fashion
of the time. In the amphitheater at Pompeii, for example (Niccolini,
Le case e i monumenti de Pompeji, Anfiteatro, Tab. Ill), we see
that the official who is superintending the athletic games, as well as

36

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

tially Egyptian, from the monuments, from the de
scriptions of Greek writers, and from the modern
Coptic physiognomy ; still, in several of them we see
the dark complexion which the Greeks and Romans
ascribe to the Egyptians, and which we should not
look for in people of Hellenic origin. But the sun of
the south quickly tans the fair European skin, and
Hellenic Greeks whose families remained in Egypt
for several generations would not be likely to pre
serve their original fair hue. Certainly most of the
pictures show us truly Greek features ; and this is the
case in many of rather dark complexion.
Besides these, however, there are a number of both
male and female portraits which display neither the
Egyptian nor the Greek type of features, but seem
very decidedly Semitic; nor need this surprise us,
when we remember how favorable a position the Hel
lenic Jews held in Alexandria. These are numbers
4-7, II, 12, 20, 44, 49 of the Graf collection, No. 2 at
Berlin, and others; and mention has been made of the
internal distribution of their tombs in the necropolis
of Kerke, and of the Semitic names on the back of
No. 7. Interesting, too, are No. 64 of the Graf col
lection, and No. i at Berlin, representing men of Ethi
opian blood. The woolly hair, thin mustache, and very
realistic but most artistically treated prognathous
facial angle, would lead us to regard No. 64 as a Ban-
too negro, but the subject appears in fact to have
been a half-breed, and to owe his clear brown skin,
children of good family (ib., Casa del Centenario, Tav. xii, fasc.
Ixviii), wear under-garments edged with red. The Proetexta was
worn as an upper garment by children of rank ; but these at Pom
peii wear a shirt-shaped tunic that looks like those in our pictures.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 37
thick whiskers, lips by no means thick, and expressive
eyes to a father or mother of a nobler race. He had,
too, attained to some position in the world ; his woolly
curls are bound with a golden fillet, and he was able
to have his likeness painted by an artist really worthy
of the proud name.
If these pictures had been laid before us without
any information as to their place of origin, without the
mummy labels and the fragments of bandages which
still cling, for instance, to No. i, and if we had been
asked to what period and what community of the an
cients they may have belonged, I, for one, should have
been compelled to reply — and correctly— by a confi
dent statement and no mere guess, that they were the
work of Hellenic Egyptians, and certainly of the hea
then period. I should have opined that they had been
found at Alexandria, or on the site of some other
Greek colony occupied by a Hellenic population with
an infusion of Asiatic elements ; for in all the ancient
world there was no other place or community where
Egyptian, Greek, and Semitic elements — nay, and
sometimes Ethiopian — could have agreed so readily to
the same character of entombment ; and, moreover,
nowhere but in Alexandria would the painter's art
have dealt with its subjects in a manner so realistic,
and so foreign to the ideal treatment of the earlier
Hellenic art. There only, I should have pronounced,
could any works so admirable in this particular style
have been produced as Nos. 2, 8, 21, 28, 45, 47, 61, 63,
and 66 of the Graf collection, or even as the Matron,
No. 42.
Other Hellenic colonies, as Tarsus, in the time of
the Diadoches, produced work of striking realistic

38 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
power, some of which may be seen in the Louvre and
some in the British Museum. But in these, which are
sculpture, we do not find such a variety of ethnic
types as in these Graeco-Egyptian portraits. Still, I
should have been right, on the whole ; I should only
have limited the area too closely ; for Alexandria we
must say Hellenized Egypt.
It would never have occurred to any one to think
of a small provincial town like Kerke as the site of the
discovery, for many of the portraits are treated in a
way which would lead us to infer that they had come
from a studio in Alexander's center of commerce,
learning, and art. The best of them are good enough
for this, and worthy of its best artists, but we learn
from them that the upper class of citizens in a provin
cial Greek colony had high requirements in artistic
matters. As we have seen, on page 23, the necropo
lis at Kerke was probably also used by the inhab
itants of the " Lake Land," as the ancient Egyptians
called the Fayum, for the deposition of their dead;
and the citizens of its chief town (Crocodilopolis, as it
was called under the Pharaohs, Arsinoe under the
Ptolemies) were a community devoted to Greek cul
ture, who endeavored to keep not too far below the
standard of Alexandria. The mass of papyrus frag
ments found among the ruins of their dwellings have
led, as has been' said, to their resurrection. We
know from the lists of taxes, etc., the names of their
streets, of their public buildings, and even of most of
the inhabitants. We know how eagerly they studied
the Greek philosophers and poets ; that they had a the
ater, a gymnasium, a Helleneion, etc. ; and we learn
that the citizens of Arsinoe, in order to give an im-

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 39
perial prefect a worthy reception, commanded the
attendance of a rhetor, probably from Alexandria. So
it is certainly no preposterous hypothesis to suppose
that a wealthy Arsinoite, wishing to have his own por
trait or his wife's or child's painted for the family liv
ing-room, should have sent for an artist to come for
the purpose from Alexandria. The copy for the
mummy may then have been made by a native artist,
for the services of a great painter brought to the pro
vincial town were no doubt a costly luxury. We
know that under the Ptolemies, and probably at a later
period, the works of the greatest artists were weighed
against gold. Ptolemy I Soter, for instance, is said
to have offered Nikias sixty talents for his Nekya — •
that is, about seventy thousand dollars ; while Pam-
philos received from each of his pupils a yearly fee of
a talent, or about eleven hundred and eighty dollars.*
And these payments must have borne some relation to
the quality of the work.
With the exception of the " Muse," so called, in the
Accademia of Cortona, which is painted on slate, no
easel pictures had hitherto been known to us, which,
with the mural painting and figures on vases, were
quite equal to the high idea we had formed of the
powers of the Greek painters; but the discovery of
these portraits has altered the case at one stroke; for
if a quantity of pictures of such high merit could be
produced in a provincial town of no great size, al
though the best and most expensive Alexandrian
painters may have been engaged to execute the origi-
* The Egyptian talent was less than the Attic. If the Attic
talents are meant the sums are incredibly high.

40 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
nals for family use, there must certainly have been
pictures in the capital itself beyond our imagining.
The opinion expressed above, that mummies may
perhaps have been sent to Kerke from Alexandria,
must, I think, be withdrawn. On the other hand, it is
quite certain that other towns of the " Lake Land " sent
their dead thither ; and we know that even in Hellenic
Egypt it was the custom to have the embalmed re
mains of the beloved dead conveyed for burial to
favorite cities of the dead. The well-known papyrus
in Paris of a letter from Senpamonthes, is proof of
how long this practice survived in Egypt, for it is
written to his brother Pamonthes, to be sent to him
with the mummy of their mother. He informs him
that the writer has paid the whole cost of the trans
port, and also tells him by what marks he may identify
the body or mummy {Ta(j>-rj, as on the wooden labels
from Rubaiyat), these being red mummy bands (Sin-
don), and their mother's name, Senyris, inscribed on
the case.
It is by no means impossible that certain persons
who had resided in the Fayum, and who died in Alex
andria, or even out of Egypt, were sent back as mum
mies to their native spot to be laid in the family tomb.
That the members of Semitic families more especially
clung to the idea of having their mortal remains
"gathered to their fathers," and commanded that they
should be sent home, we know ; and not only from
the carrying of Jacob to be buried in Canaan (Gen. 1,
S), but from inscriptions remaining from the period
under consideration, and as we have seen among the
persons buried at Kerke, some seem to have been of
Hebrew origin. And the letter of Senpamonthes, just

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 41
referred to, shows that even under the Roman rule
Egyptian mummies made long journeys, for he tells his
brother that the mummy of their mother, with all the
necessary adornments and ready for the tomb, was to
travel by ship, " carriage paid," if I may so express it.

The Date of these Portraits.
That they were all painted for heathen mummies.
Now with regard to the date at which these por
traits were painted, it can only be sought at a time sub
sequent to the complete fusion of Hellenic with Egyp
tian life. At an early period after the founding of Alex
andria the amalgamation of the various ethnological
elements was not sufficiently complete for heathen
Greeks and Hebrews to accept the funereal customs of
Egypt, or for Egyptians to set aside the conventional
art of their nation and allow their corpses to be graced
by Greek artists.
If, therefore, we seek the earliest term — the earliest
date, that is to say — when these portraits can have been
painted, we must first examine the fundamental ques
tion as to whether the pictures discovered in the Fay
um had their origin in heathen or Christian times.
They all, beyond any possible doubt are portraits
of heathens. The mummy of a boy, found by Mr. Flinders Petrie
at Hawara (now in the Peel Park Museum, Manches
ter), is of itself enough to settle this point, for the fig
ures on the gilt case which incloses it are those of the
principal gods concerned in the Egyptian service of

42 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
the dead — Isis and Nephthys and the jackal-headed
Anubis — regarded by the Hellenes as corresponding to
their Hermes Psychopompos, the guide of the soul
after death. There are other figures of the Egyptian
Pantheon on this mummy, as well as on another case,
likewise gilt, which was found, partly in very good
preservation but bereft of its inmate, in the sand of
the necropolis at Kerke.
The painted mummy cloths, Greek in style, of
which several are preserved in the Berlin Museum, also
belong to the same group of works, and at least one
of these was brought from the necropolis at Hawara.
The mummies they enveloped had not any portrait at
tached ; the image of the dead Was painted on the cer
ement. It was usually executed of life-size, and the
figure was shown in Greek costume. And that these
paintings were done at a heathen period is clear from
the fact that on every known mummy cloth of this
kind the image is guarded by Osiris and Anubis, the
gods of the dead.
Among the many evidences of the heathen origin
of all these paintings, I will here only mention the
picture of bound prisoners detected by the lamented
Egyptologist Miss Amelia Edwards at the foot end of
a mummy case which contained a portrait mummy.
Such images are frequently seen on the sole of the
shoes with which the early heathen mummies were
shod. They refer to the prayer, repeated again and
again in the Book of the Dead and other religious writ
ings of the Pharaonic period, expressing the hope of
the deceased that he may be lord over his foes and
trample them under his feet. This was what Horus
had done in his fight for his father Osiris. The career

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 43
of the triumphant dead culminated in apotheosis — that
is, the absorption into the god or Osiris — and thus he
went his way with his foe under his feet. Finally, I
must here mention an ornament found by Herr Richter
on the small portrait mummy No. 94. It consists of a
series of disks surrounding the lower portion of the
mummy, and at some little distance apart. Each disk
is about three centimetres in diameter (one inch and
three sixteenths), and from the center, marked by
a small circle, radiating lines divide it into twelve
equal parts. They are colored red, like the sun on
monuments of the Pharaohs, and precisely resemble it;
whereas on early Christian monuments they would
have no meaning, and in fact never occur.
Indeed, the mere fact of attaching a portrait to a
mummy is an idea quite akin to the heathen Egyptian
beliefs. It was no part of their religion to contemplate
the decay of the body after death. Embalming would
preserve the perishable remains, while the immortal
spirit — the soul — Ba, would depart in the sun bark and
be carried to the gates of the other world, in the west
beyond Abydos. If it should then be its fortune to be
come Osiris — that is, to be absorbed into the divinity— it
still would not altogether lose its identity. It might yet
be able to return visibly to those it had quitted, in the
form it had worn on earth ; and it was especially to
this end that the body was preserved as a mummy, and
even in early times a statue placed in the tomb or a
portrait attached to the coffin. This presentment of
the deceased the Ka — that is to say, his spiritual
double, the genius that wore his form — was supposed
to inhabit, that the features might not perish by which
in life he had been distinguished from other mortals.

44 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
When his posterity visited the tomb they addressed
their appeals and offerings not to the departed nor to
his image, but to the Ka which dwelt within the image
as a hand is covered with a glove. As early as under
the first empire there was in each sepulchre of a man
of rank a special chamber (serdab) for the statue to
which incense was burned and offerings made ; this was
called the " house of the Ka." During life the Ka was
one with the human being; after death it abandoned
him, like the soul (Ba) the shadow (srit), the spirit
the feelings (ab), and the shining element Chu, which
is hard to define ; then it went to dwell in the picture
or in the statue, which, on the other hand, helped it to
preserve the true form, thus representing the inner and
outer individuality of the deceased. But the Ka could
free itself from the statue or from the portrait attached
to the mummy which perpetuated the personal char
acteristics of the dead, and then the soul used it as a
medium when it desired to visit the earth. If the Ka
were lost, the immortal part of the deceased lost its in
dividuality, and that power of earthly apparition which
was indispensable to enable him to dwell in the sem
blance he had borne on earth in the memory of his pos
terity, to whom he looked for the pious service of mak
ing the offerings due to the dead. Hence an image of
some kind was a necessary part of a completely fitted
heathen Egyptian tomb. Though in early times this
was supplied by means of sculpture, at a later period,
when painting cast sculpture into the shade, and men
were less inclined to make great sacrifices for such mat
ters of dogma ; when, too, great painters could produce
such striking likenesses, they were intrusted with the
task of making portraits for the habitation of the Ka.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

45

The' Hellenic Egyptians, and yet more the Greeks and
Israelites, would scarcely remember what religious
motive had first required the making of an image, and
in attaching the picture to the mummy only followed
a fashion which was pleasing and attractive as a means
and token of remembrance. It made its way from the
Fayum as far as to the oases in the Libyan Desert;
and as good painters were scarce there, no doubt, while
men who understood stone carving must have found
constant employment in repairing the temples, the
mummy was there provided with a bust instead of a
picture. About forty of these busts were recently dug
up in the great oasis. Several are deposited in the
Louvre ; two are in the Graf collection. They are made
of a composition (natural or artificial), at present under
going analysis,* and were attached to the top of the
mummies as it were on the top of a sack. The holes
for the strings by which they were tied in their place are
to be seen in No. 97 (Fig. 2). Notwithstanding their
plastic form they belong to the same category as the
portraits under consideration, for they are a highly
realistic presentment of the features of the dead to
whose mummy they were attached. They are faintly
colored, and the character of the modeling is very
much akin to that of the painters who executed several
of the later and inferior portraits in the Graf collec
tion. Maspero, who wrote about them (La Nature,
* Professor Gooth, of Munich, gives as the result of his analysis :
A mixture of sand consisting of minute grains of quartz, clay — no
doubt kaolin — gypsum, and a very small portion of lime carbonate.
It is either a sedimentary clay with an artificial admixture of sand,
or a natural form of impure gypsum unusually rich in clay, from a
stratum in the soil of the oasis.
4

46 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
1892, p. 305 ff), assigned them to the end of the setond
or beginning of the third century after Christ ; and M.
de Villefosse pointed out with some reason the re-

IMAGEJ'ROM a MUMMY FROM THE GREAT OASIS.
semblance of one of them to Pescennius Niger, the
pseudo-Cjesar who opposed Septimius Severus. I agree
with Maspero as to the period of their origin.
Although these busts are, among the latest forms

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 47
of image attached to mummies, they have eyes insert
ed made of talc, just as may be seen in the earliest
statues of the time of the pyramids. These give them,
I may say, an intrusively living expression — barbaric,
indeed, to the taste of the Greeks and Romans. The
beard, too, applied to the finished head is anti-Greek ;
and a little scene represented on the back both of No.
97 Graf collection (Fig. 2) and of one presented to the
Louvre by M. Bouriant, decisively marks these busts
as Egyptian and as heathen. It shows the mummied
corpse lying down, with a female figure kneeling at the
head and feet. This is the familiar scene, occurring a
thousand times in the Book of the Dead and else
where, of Isis and Nephthys — the Greater and- the
Lesser — uplifting their voices as wailing women by the
bier of Osiris, their husband and brother, to express
their anguish and call him back to earth. The text
of their lament is best preserved on a papyrus at Ber
lin of the time of the Persian dominion. On these
busts the wailing goddesses are represented in the old
Egyptian style, but in a manner which betrays little
concern for the old canon ; and the hieroglyphics
over the heads of the figures, which are always to be
seen in genuine Egyptian work, are here absent. As a
work of art this little picture is worthless, but it
proves that the busts on which it occurs were wrought
by heathen for heathen, who, as has been said, may
have lived at the end of the second century after Christ,
and were magnates among the residents in the oasis.
In these busts again the physiognomy shows that
they belonged to various nationalities, for one is of
the Greek type, another Roman, and a third Semitic;
a fourth might be classed as a half-breed in whose

48

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

veins flowed a mixture of Egyptian and Roman blood.
Nor need this surprise us when we remember that the
oases, colonized from Egypt at a very early date, and
conquered and exploited by the Persians,* became
Hellenic under the Ptolemies, and were protected and
fortified by the Romans as commercial stations and
used as places of exile for political offenders. They
were, too, headquarters of the caravan trade, in which
the Phoenicians early took a prominent part, and we
might therefore expect to find them peopled by a va
riety of mixed races.
Their beautiful temples continued to be devoted
to the old Egyptian cult till Christianity usurped its
place. Hellenic influence had already infused into it
a strong Greek element, and the spirit of the times
had introduced magic and mysticism of every kind.
These circumstances fully account for the character
of the busts recently dug out of the soil. To us their
great interest lies in the proof they afford that the de
sire to decorate the body of the dead with some image
of the living was generally prevalent in the Grseco-
Egyptian communities. They also demonstrate that
those whose care it was to fulfill that desire, and who
were entombed in the form of portrait mummies, were
heathen ; at any rate, such as had been the subjects of
the later Lagides or who had lived in Romanized
Egypt and the oases of the Libyan Desert.
Hence, as it is amply proved that so considerable a
number of portrait mummies were undoubtedly ex-
* The principal temple in the Great Oasis — Chargeh. or in old
Egyptian Heb — was founded by the Persian King Darius I, and re
stored for the first time by Darius II.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. aq
ecuted by and for idolaters, the theory that any Chris
tian would ever have allowed a corpse to be thus pre
pared is entirely excluded.
Two portrait mummies at Bulak, which I formerly
regarded as Christian, I now agree with A. Ermann
in pronouncing to be heathen.

The Second Century before Christ considered
AS THE Period of the Portrait Mummies.
Proved by reference to records of the earliest Greek mum
mies, by the history of art, and by circumstantial evi
dence from the pictures themselves, especially No. 7
(Graf collection).
If, then, these portraits are of heathen workman
ship, the question now arises as to the century in
which Hellenic Greeks first adopted the practice of
having their dead prepared for the tomb in the form
of mummies. This must have been at a period when, as we may
conclude from other circumstances and evidence, the
amalgamation of Hellenes and Greeks had so far ad
vanced that Hellenic culture could accommodate it
self to Egyptian customs. It might be safe to assume
this to have been in the third century before Christ ;
it is at any rate quite certain to have been in the sec
ond. We must in the first instance confine our atten
tion to the portrait mummies; and it is of great im
portance to the determination of the earliest date when
they can have been painted to note that undoubted rec
ords exist of Greek corpses having been prepared as

so

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

mummies in the second century before Christ. Prof.
U. Wilcken, of Breslau, has published documents of
that period which prove the fact to a demonstration.*
As it can thus be shown beyond dispute that so far
back as in the second century before Christ many
Greeks were entombed in the Egyptian manner and
embalmed by Egyptian paraschites (eviscerators), not
alone in Alexandria but even in Upper Egypt, at
Thebes and in small towns (Turin papyrus No. 8), we
may very well suppose that the oldest of these por
traits dates from the same period. Some of the finest
are of such workmanship that we may ascribe them to
the time of the Ptolemies, when the full flower of
Alexandrian art was but just beginning slowly to fade,
rather than to the date of the decadence under Roman
rule after the Christian era. A glance at the history
of art confirms the probability of the date assigned to
the oldest of the portraits, namely, the second cen
tury before Christ.
Greek mummies such as are found in the Fayum
can hardly have been made under the three first
Ptolemies (b. c. 323 to 222), for it was not till the
time of Ptolemy II Philadelphus (-I-247 b. c.) that the
worship of Serapis was generally recognized as a cult
destined to reconcile the religious prejudices of the
Greeks and Egyptians, or that the Jewish community
at Alexandria had accommodated itself to Greek hab
its and views. It may well be supposed that a Hellen
ized and free-thinking Israelite of that time, speaking
Greek, studying Greek philosophy, named after some
* Jahrbuch des K. deutschen archaologischen Instituts, Band
iv, 1889, pt. i, p. 5.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 51
Greek god — Apollodoros or Hermaios — and appreciat
ing Greek works of art, might collect them or place
them in his house ; knowing, also, that even in his
native land of Palestine the dead were wrapped in
linen and entombed in rock caves, he might be ready
and willing to have the body of the dead he had loved
treated after the Hellenic-Egyptian manner, and deco
rated with an image, however severely such a prac
tice might be reprobated by his stricter fellow Jews.
It is, indeed, more difficult to conceive of this as
applying to colonists of pure Greek origin. The
fusion must have been complete, indeed, before they
could accept such a thoroughly Egyptian tradition.
In fact, we meet with no mention of any Hellenic
mummy of the third century before Christ. But in
the second they were frequent. Under Euergetes
II Physkon (-|- 117) Egypt was closely allied with
Cyprus; and when we hear of two stone sarcophagi
found in that island, of good Greek workmanship, in
the mummy form with faces treated as portraits (Ces-
nola. Descriptive Atlas V, xci, 589 and 590), we have
a right to suppose that the custom of making portrait
mummies had been introduced there. If the inscrip
tion, now erased, on Cesnola's No. 589 was indeed
Phoenician, the portrait mummies found there would
have been those of Semitic settlers.
It has already been said that there is a name in
Semitic character on the back of No. 7 (Graf collec
tion). Renan and other savants first examined it at
the Paris exhibition ; but the first to decipher it was
Prof. Euting, of Strassburg, who is exceptionally
skilled in the ancient Semitic character. In 1891 he
specially devoted himself to interpreting the six let-

52 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
ters written in black on the back of No. 7, and de
ciphered them as the name Ba'al 'adar, i. e., Ba'al helps
or Ba'al commands.
m " Ba'al 'adar. J

The character points to a period from 450 to 300
B. c. Besides this name some figures are drawn, also
in black, which would seem to be of the same date as
the writing. How, then, did this name come to be on
the picture ? We shall return to this question, and a
consideration of the accompanying figures on the back
of the panel, after a further examination of the por
trait itself.
The youth whose likeness is painted on the front
of the panel wears a peculiar lock of hair, such as we
see again in several of the pictures, and this led me to
an observation of great importance for determining
the date — which, indeed, raised much opposition,
but which I must, on the whole, adhere to. Even
Wilcken, who can not accept my conclusions, regards
it " as extremely remarkable " that this side lock may
no doubt be identical with the side lock familiar to
every student of the monuments as the invariable dec
oration of princes. But he does not admit that it im
plies that the youth of No. 7 was of royal blood,
"since on the monuments this lock is worn even by
the children of ordinary mortals." This is true. But
when the lock is worn by a grown man it is without

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 5,
exception an indication of connection with the royal
family, or of divine origin, and a close examination of
all the monuments confirms the fact. Ermann's re-
remark that " the sons of kings wore the distinctive
lock of infancy all their life through " is absolutely
correct. But none but personages connected with
the royal family wore it beyond childhood and dur
ing manhood. How little Heydemann had mastered
the subject, is proved by the fact that the very in
stances he adduces in evidence of the statement that
even the children of ordinary mortals wore the lock,
all represent princes or youthful deities.
It has been asserted that this mark of high descent
lost its original form under the new empire, and from
a plait of hair had degenerated into a broad ribbon,
commonly with a fringe. This ribbon is no doubt to
be seen on several princes of the later empire, on the
son of Rameses III, for example ; but it is so broad
and stiff that it would seem to have incased the lock
or to have been regarded as a substitute for it. In
war, when it was difficult to keep the lock smoothly
plaited, kings' sons commonly wear this band or case.
And they sometimes wear it in solemn processions,
perhaps because they were required to appear, even
though unarmed, in a guise suggestive of the war in
which they had taken part. But that the princes
plaited this lock with care, even under the later king
dom, may be seen in the youthful portrait of Rameses
II in the Louvre (a bas-relief in limestone ; see Perrot
et Chipiez, Histoire de I'Art, Tab. I, p. 706). Every
strand of the plait is visible, as well as the little tie
which fastens it at the end, as in our No. 7 portrait.
A diadem crowns the prince's brow, temples, and head,

54 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
and from it two bands, wider at the bottom, hang
down his back. I am of the opinion that if these were
pushed forward at the sides they would cover the
plaits, and be mistaken for the bands or cases which
are erroneously supposed to have taken the place of
the locks. These can be seen in pictures all through
the new kingdom, to the time of the Ptolemies and
the Romans. They were originally an attribute of
the infant Horus; and it is, as has been said, perfectly
true that they were worn by other children than those
of the Pharaohs ; but where they are seen on the fig
ure of a grown-up man it represents without exception
a god or a member of the royal household. This I
take to be an axiom proof against all contention.
The persons represented in Nos. 7 and 60, and who
wear this lock, are certainly portraits of grown-up*
persons. It is true that, with the express purpose of proving
that the portraits in the Graf collection are of the
Roman period, an attempt has been made to show that
No. 60 represents a lad of fifteen ; but I think that
every unprejudiced judge would agree with me that
he was about twenty years of age. Most of the
friends and acquaintances whose opinion I have asked
have thought he might be from nineteen to thirty
years old. I must therefore persist in maintaining
that the young man represented in No. 7 was closely
connected with the Lagides.
Still, it can not but surprise us to find a Ptolemaic
* Including as grown-up a youth, or Ephebos. Where the lock
is seen on the offspring of an ordinary mortal it is always on a child
of tender years.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

55

prince buried in the "Lake Land." It makes it need
ful that we should in the first place examine more
closely the connections and customs of the Lagides'
court, and we shall then find that the peculiarities of
No. 7 admit of an explanation which deprives the in
terment of the youth in the provincial necropolis of
its singularity.
Foremost of those who enjoyed personal intimacy
with the Ptolemies were the oT^yyeveis, or " relations of
the king," a name given to the holders of certain high
offices and dignitaries. They were addressed in letters
from the king himself as " father " or "brother," ac
cording to their age and rank. Their honors seem to
have been hereditary, and to have descended to their
children, with the intention, doubtless, of constituting a
trusted class of nobles to be about the king's person.
We may pass over the titles of other dignitaries at
court to dwell on that of the younger satellites of the
Lagides,, among whom we often meet with the ^Sao-tAeioi
iratSes, Or royal children, forming a corps of cadets or
pages brought up at court. Whether those sons of
distinguished priests who were selected to attend on
Pharaoh, according to Diodoros (I, 70), for their su
perior education — and they must have been more than
twenty years of age — whether these correspond to the
iraiScs is doubtful ; and indeed it seems rash to accept
Diodoros word for word, especially in this chapter,
where he seems to be expressly giving a highly colored
picture of a prince after his own heart. And as he
wrote after the fall of the Lagides he had nothing to
fear from criticism as to details. That young men of
rank certainly surrounded the king and attended him
is at any rate an established fact. Thus, besides the

56

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

TraiSes we find /AEWaxes (youths) of the king at the court
of the Lagides. These, indeed, bore arms and formed
a sort of youthful body guard, or rather garde noble;
they were recruited from among the sons of the
" king's relations " and other men of high rank.
Now the TratSes and /.icAAaKfs, or children and youths
of the king, may very likely have been allowed to
wear the plaited lock as an external mark of their
nearness to the sovereign. It may have been the
recognized mark of the male progeny of the truyyeveis,
or king's relations, till the wearer had arrived at man's
estate and inherited the dignity borne by his father,
who was usually high in office. Diodoros, as we have
seen, tells us that the pages in attendance on the sov
ereign were sons of noble priests; and this must have
been the case, because the high offices of state were
commonly filled by priests, and they sometimes even
had the command of the army or the fleet ; and even if
these noble young attendants on the king received a
military training they might nevertheless be regarded
as pages in the prince's personal train. If the /xeXAaKcs,
or youth, were no more than a body guard, as sons of
the " king's relations " they were members of the royal
house who were allowed, or required, to wear the lock.
We may with good reason assume that the youths
wearing the lock depicted in these portraits corre
spond to those of whom Diodoros speaks as being
educated at the court and sons of the highest mag
nates of the land; but the Sicilian writer may have
ascribed to them this high culture and an age above
twenty to make their improving influence over the
sovereign who enjoyed their intimacy seem more prob
able. Such a one as Physkon, however, sought

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

57

mental pabulum in very different circles from that of
the youths who attended him.
Our hypothesis gains support from the circum
stance that No. 7, at any rate, must, as we shall see,
have belonged to a very noble house ; that we never
meet with the lock — which occurs in five portraits — in
the picture of a man of advanced age, and that among
the "relations" of the king we find not only Mace
donians, but provincial Egyptians, as Phommutis from
the Thebaid, Paniskos of the district of Panopolis, and
others. The admiral and high priest governing the island
of Cyprus always bears the title of " relative of the
king"; so do the Greek high priest and prophet of
Philse, the sacred island of Isis, in the extreme south of
Egypt, beyond the first cataract.* And certainly a
magnate of the district of Arsinoe might quite as well
belong to the king's relations as one of Latopolis or
Tentyra, and his son to the king's youths. If he,
therefore, wore the lock and died young his mummy
portrait would of course show it. Whether he died at
home, at Alexandria, or anywhere else, indeed, his
body would be conveyed to the family tomb for inter
ment. This explanation seems to me the true one. In
any case it is hard to believe that youths of rank were
permitted in Roman times to wear a mark of distinc
tion which in so rebellious a province would have been
a constant reminder of the dethroned dynasty. It
might be tolerated in children, as on them it could
* LumT)roso, L'economie politique de I'Egypte sous les Lagides,
Turin, 1870.

58

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

have no political significance ; but on a young man of
twenty it would have been different.
If we look more closely at No. 7 and No. 60 we
see that the men represented are beardless, like most
members of the family of the Lagides and the youths
generally of the Ptolemaic period, although their age
would have allowed of their encouraging the growth
of hair on the upper lip, cheeks, and chin. If their
father was a "relation of the king" and native to the •
province, we need feel no surprise at finding their
mummies in a necropolis used, as we shall see, by the
inhabitants of Arsinoe.
A further examination of No. 7 also shows that the
young man of about twenty whom it represents was a
member of a family whose head may very well have
belonged to the " relations of the king." It is not
rash to regard him even as one of the corps of royal
pages. He must, in any case, have been illustrious
beyond the other youths of his age, who are all de
picted in very simple garb, for he is quite splendidly
attired. The rich fillet of gold round his head is
usually worn only by men of riper years, or by women.
The boy No. 27 has only a golden network in his
hair, though he, too, seems to be of a noble family.
It is only in No. 7 that we find a purple ribbon plaited
with gold, and falling from the head to the breast,
with a round object firmly twined into the center, or
slipped on to it. What this round object, ornamented
on the surface with a small design in gold, ia meant to
represent can not be determined. This much alone is
certain, that it hangs by the ribbon half way down the
breast. If we examine other Egyptian monuments for a

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

59

similar adornment we meet with it only in one instance,
though we have scarcely overlooked a single image ;
and that is on the very remarkable torso and head of a
statue in the Bulak Museum * which was found among
the ruins of Crocodilopolis (Arsinoe), whose citizens
apparently buried their dead in the same cemetery
whence was obtained our No. 7. This fragment of a
statue, which wears the same ornament as the portrait,
belongs to a group of monuments of which Mariette
excavated the best examples at Tanis, and which he
pronounced to be monuments of the period of the
Hyksos, whose capital was at Tanis. Naville discov
ered others of the same time at Bubastis, in the Delta.
The features, mode of hair dressing, and other details
differ greatly from those of purely Egyptian statues,
and the altars hung with fish, which are also offered on
them, while men of this type stand behind them, are
not usual by the Nile. They are commonly supposed
to be Hyksos kings or priests offering sacrifice; but
they have also been called river gods. As regards the
fragmentary statue discovered at Crocodilopolis-Ar-
sinoe I accept the former explanation ; the person rep
resented is certainly not of Egyptian origin. The ques
tion as to what tribe of the Hyksos he may have be
longed to can not here be fully discussed ; it need only
be said that the invaders who conquered the country
at the end of the third thousand years before Christ
were undoubtedly Asiatics, and that their worship of
Ba'al became fused with the Egyptian cult of Set. This
* Mariette, Notice des principaux monuments etc. du Musee a
Bulak, Alexandrie, 1868, p 58, No. 2. A^ood representation of it
may be most readily seen in Perrot et Chipiez's Histoire de I'Art,
Paris 1882, tome i, p. 686, Fig. 467.

6o THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
divinity must have been recognized wherever the Hyk
sos ruled, and consequently in the Fayum. The men
standing behind the altar must therefore be priests of
Ba'al, and the injured statue found at Crocodilopolis-
Arsinoe represents a personage who was of the same
nationality as they. I should regard him as a high
priest rather than as a king ; he wears the panther skin
over his shoulders, as head of the Egyptian hierarchy.
The head and claws remain visible. A fish altar prob
ably stood in front of the figure and it may here be
observed that the worshipers of Ba'al — particularly
the -Arameans — held most fish sacred, and both pre
served and sacrificed them in honor of their god,
whereas the Egyptians regarded fish, with few excep
tions, as unclean. To the votaries of Ba'al they figured
the mysterious power of nature working in unseen
depths, as Edward Meyer strikingly points out.
It is on the breast of the Hyksos prince or priest of
Ba'al from Crocodilopolis-Arsinoe that we find an or
nament answering exactly to the ribbon hanging from
the neck of No. 7, and on it, in the middle, we see
identically the same round object.
From the fact that the Crocodile province was re
garded as unholy, as well as from various- other cir
cumstances, we may conclude that the worship of Ba'al
still existed in the capital of the Fayum ; and that the
young man represented on No. 7 is one of the class of
high priests of Ba'al at Crocodilopolis-Arsinoe is prob
able. The idea is confirmed by the inscription on the
back of the panel, which, as we have seen, reads: Ba'al
'adar, meaning Ba'al helps or Ba'al commands. Since
the Aramaic letters forming the words must have been
written, at the earliest, about three hundred years be-

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 6 1
fore Christ, they may have existed on the panel before
the picture was painted, and a panel so inscribed might
very easily have been preserved from an early period
in the house of Ba'al's high priest, since the dignity
seems to have been hereditary. The son of so im
portant an official would naturally be in the corps of
royal attendants, for his father, like other high priests,
would be accounted one of the king's " relations," and
he himself in riper age would come to be numbered
among them. No. 7 depicts him, still wearing the
lock, at the age of eighteen to twenty.
The panel bearing the name Ba'al 'adar might,
however, have been brought to Egypt long previously,
in the course of traffic with some Asiatic country.
Aramaic was already the language of commerce, and
of all documents among the Semitic races even in the
last centuries before Christ and the early years of the
Christian era, and Alexandria, by her extensive trade,
was closely connected with Asia Minor. Our panel
may have been part of a chest or case of precious mer
chandise ; though very possibly tablets of cypress wood
were imported expressly for painting on from Syria,
Phoenicia, or Cyprus, and marked on the back with
the name of the persons supplying them, or of those to
whom they were consigned. Still, to me it appears
most probable that this board had long filled a place
in the high priest's house, to admonish the household
to remember that " Ba'al helps."
The figures on the back of the panel have been re
garded as caricatures. But this is an error. I should
suppose them, on the contrary, to be attempts made by
a hand practiced in Egyptian conventional art to indi
cate to the painter what was required. The curved
5

62 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
lines, half effaced, perhaps are meant to represent the
lock of hair and to show the artist its correct form.
A multitude of guesses which arise from this identifica
tion need not here be detailed. I will allude only to one.
No. 7, in spite of the high rank of the subject, is by no
means one of the best pictures. If the youth died
abroad — in Cyprus, perchance — and if a painter had
there been commissioned to execute the portrait, it
commends itself to our judgment to imagine that the
Egyptian who came to fetch away the mummy sketched
on the back of the panel in his own stiff manner the
point on which he wished particular care to be lavished.
Heydemann's attempt to identify this lock with a
fashion of dressing the hair which Lucian describes as
worn by Egyptian boys, and which suggested to him
the old Ionian krobylos, is quite a mistake. The KptoPvXxK
was a plait of hair standing erect from the crown of
the head, and Lucian (Navigium, §§ 2 and 3) says quite
clearly : " The boys wear the hair drawn back from
the forehead on both sides and bound behind the
head." This is plainly enough described, and the lock
under discussion was always worn on one side only,
and over the ear. Lucian, whose descriptions are al
ways conspicuously lucid, cannot have alluded to this.
Thus the lock worn by No. 7 may serve to give
validity to my view that the person it represents be
longed to an old family of high priests attached to the
worship of Ba'al or Set, as established from the period
of the Hyksos in Crocodilopolis-Arsinoe. If his father
was the chief priest — for he himself looks too young,
though Heliogabalus was even younger when he filled
the office of High Priest of the Sun at Emesa — the
Ptolemaic sovereign can hardly have failed to invite

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 63
him to court and enroll him among the royal pages.
Hence No. 7 must at the latest have been painted
towards the close of the rule of the Lagides, in the last
century before Christ. And this assertion is supported
by other reasons, which seem to prove irrefutably that
the oldest of these portraits owe their existence to this
period, nay, perhaps — or indeed most likely — to the
second century before Christ, though to the last years
of it.

Further Evidence that the Earliest Portraits
MUST HAVE BEEN EXECUTED UNDER THE LaTER
Ptolemies.
Similar documents in Cyprus and at Pompeii. The ceme
teries at Rubaiyat, Kerke, and Hawara. The hya-
cinthine purple. The left or sword side. Flowers
and wreaths.
We will now direct our attention for a moment to
other and allied works of art, and glance at the burial
places of Kerke and Hawara, examining the character
istics of certain portraits which promise to throw light
on the subject in question.
Two coffins of mummy form were found by Cesnola
in the island of Cyprus, with effigies at the head end.
They are indeed masks ; still they show an affinity
with the portraitlike style of the Egyptian mummy
cases under discussion, and both would be at once re
ferred by any unprejudiced judge to the period of the
Ptolemies rather than that of the Roman occupation.
One of them (Cesnola, XCI, 590) shows traces of color

64 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
on the eyes and hair, and the face, too, was painted.*
The discoverer's remarks are quite to the purpose :
" The treatment of the hair, though somewhat super
ficial, is yet of an excellent period. The type of the
face is also large and simple in style." No. 589, which
resembles it, but wears three rows of curls, once had an
inscription, but it is so much defaced that Cesnola can
only pronounce it to be Phoenician. Traces of some
of the characters seem to have induced him to regard
it as Semitic. These sarcophagi at any rate prove that
such coffins were in use in Cyprus, and probably under
the Ptolemies.
In Pompeii, too, we meet with pictures which remind
us of our portraits. Most like them is the double por
trait from the house of the baker and duumvir (magis
trate) P. Paquius (Pacuvius) Proculiis,f representing
that respectable citizen and his pretty young wife. It
is painted on the wall of the tablinum, and although it
would seem to be a good likeness, as a work of art it is
far behind the best portraits in the Graf collection. It
is similar in execution. We shall presently return to
the discussion of the influence of Alexandrian art on
that of Campania, which was pointed out by Helbig
long before the discovery of the portraits from the
Fayum. The most flourishing period of art in Pompeii is
(according to Nissen) to be dated from 200 to 300 b. c,
and it was during this time that Alexandrian influence
* Cesnola, A Descriptive Atlas of the Cesnola Collection of
Cypriote Antiquities, etc,
f Represented in Nicolini, Nuovi scavi. Le case ed i Monu
menti di Pompeii. Napoli, I mestieri e le Industrie di Pompejani.
Tav. I (to the left hand, at the bottom).

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 65
made itself most strongly felt, while the portrait mum
mies may be ascribed to about the middle of the period.
Finding pictures there, as we do, nearly allied to these
portraits, the Alexandrian must still be regarded as the
earlier, and the growth of art in Pompeii (which was
destroyed a. d. 79) ceased, as has been said, in about
80 B. c. Even among the very best of the Campanian
portraits there are none which do not sink into the
shade by the side of the finest of the mummy portraits ;
and this circumstance again warrants us in ascribing
the earliest of these portraits to a date between 200
and 80 B. c, that is, in the second century before Christ.
It would be vain to attempt to identify the ethno
logical affinities of the persons represented in pictures
only of the head and bust, and intended as mere re
membrances of the dead ; still, as we find among a
considerable number of portraits from one and the
same place only rare examples of a purely Roman or
African type, we are, I think, justified in regarding
that place as belonging to a colony where Roman in
fluence was as yet little felt, and where the Egyptian
element was already dying out. As the pictures found
in the necropolis of Kerke are almost all Greek, Sem
itic, or a mixture of the two, and a few others occur
which seem to betray a mixture of Hellenic and Egyp
tian blood, we may infer that this burial place belonged
to a Greek settlement which, like Alexandria and other
Hellenized towns, permitted the presence of Semitic,
elements, and had not yet been compelled to endure
the intrusion of the military and civil myrmidons of
the Roman Empire.
This exactly meets the case of Arsinoe before the
subjection of Egypt to Rome.

66 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
Even under the Romans it remained a Greek town;
its importance under the Ptolemies may be best under
stood from the statement of so trustworthy a writer as
Schweinfurth, who says of the ruins of the ancient
Crofcodilopolis-Arsinoe : " The coins of the Ptolemies
are sold by the kilo, as old copper." *
And portrait mummies were entombed in the ne
cropolis of Kerke even in Roman times, though, as it
seemed to me from what have been found there, cer
tainly in less number ; while the bodies and portraits
brought to light at Hawara by Flinders Petrie and
others are for the most part of the imperial period.
This place, Hawara (now pointed out as the site of
the Labyrinth), was only half as far from Arsinoe as Ru
baiyat, and it may therefore be assumed that the Greek
colony settled in the ancient Crocodilopolis carried
their dead, and, after the middle of the second century
before Christ their picture mummies to Kerke ; but at
a later date, for some unknown reason — after the de
struction of the Labyrinth — deposited them at Hawara.
When we compare the best portraits in the Graf
collection with the worst brought to Europe by him
and Flinders Petrie, we at once perceive that, though
the difference is no doubt due to the talents of the re
spective painters, a general decay of the arts seems
extremely probable.
It can be proved from other evidence that the cus
tom of decorating mummies with portraits persisted
for a long time. This is clear, partly from variations
in the mode of burial and the costume of the dead,
* Reise in das Depressionsgebiet ira Umkreise des Fayum,
Zeitschrift der Gesellsch. fiir Erdkunden, Berlin, 1886, p. 148 A.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

^7

partly from the altered technique of the workmanship.
At first — and therefore in the best pictures — encaustic
was most frequently employed; subsequently tempera
painting was thought good enough. But what is par
ticularly remarkable is the fact that panels have been
found painted on both sides. As a work of art the
second picture is far inferior to the first, and, consid
ering the pious reverence shown in preserving the
mummies, a long time must have elapsed, and more
than one generation have passed away, before any one
dared remove a portrait from the dead and use it to
paint another head on.
To resume our conclusions in one sentence : Arsinoe,
a Hellenic colony, buried her dead in two cemeteries.
The first was much the farther off from Kerke. For
some unknown reason the older necropolis of Hawara
was subsequently preferred. And in Roman times this
was the favorite cemetery, where, with older and finer
portrait mummies, a large proportion of later paintings
have been found, among them several of the time of
Hadrian, while others seem to be of the date of the
Antonines and their successors.
If we now more closely investigate 4,he best and
earliest portraits in the Graf collection we find that my
hypothesis as to their date is supported by many minor
circumstances. In the first place, we find many portions
of clothing which are colored purple. Now it is well
known that Julius Caesar restricted the use and display
of purple, and that Nero promulgated a still more
stringent edict against the wearing of garments of
that color, which Gratian Valentinian and Theodosius
prohibited at a still later date. Adolf Schmidt, how
ever, has pointed out that though it was to the interest

68 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
of the Caesars to prohibit the wearing of purple as
being their prerogative at a time wh&n purpuram sumere
and imperium sumere were synonymous, the use of it
was not absolutely interdicted; purple was at all times
in use in the form of stripes, edgings, and trimmings.
In many of these portraits the ribbons before men
tioned are of a light purple hue, and several, both men
and women, wear garments of this color. This, indeed,
was permitted even in imperial times. On the other
hand, private persons were strictly forbidden to wear
cloaks of two particular shades or tints of purple.
These, as A. Schmidt conclusively proves, v/ere, first,
blood color or red purple ; secondly, the purple of the
hyacinth or amethyst, which was reckoned noble. This
was a rich violet, a mixture of the deepest purple and
buccin. It was the earliest and most rechercM of all
hues, called color principalis, eximius,2MA felix, reserved
to Caesar, and undoubtedly the dye which Augustus
meant when he allowed only senators in office to wear
it besides himself. Virgil (Georg. IV, v, 275) says of
it: "Violrn sublucet purpura nigrce" — beneath the black
(dark) violet the purple gleams. A mantle of hyacin-
thine or amethyst purple was not merely deep violet
butwhat we call "shot," that is to say, colored so
that the blackish violet blue showed a red gleam in
the light.
From the time of Julius Caesar no private or official
person was allowed to wear such a cloak ; and inas
much as our portraits represent men who do wear
them, these must have lived before the time of the
Caesar, for even Theodosius prohibited such a garment.
It was an imperial privilege to appear in stuffs of this
magnificent hue. In the time of the Ptolemies, how-

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

69

ever, any one in Egypt might wear it, and at that time
the purple dye there seems to have been little inferior
to that of Tyre ; at any rate, the shell purple of Alex
andria was famous in the days of Plautus (184 b. c.)
at an epoch not long before that when the earliest»of
these portraits seem to have been executed.
Among those in the Graf collection we find four
men wearing the mantle of hyacinth or amethyst pur
ple, and this appears to me conclusive. They are Nos.
22, 6, 4, and 5, and it can not be accidental that all four
of these, and these only, are marked as men of high
rank by other tokens, and that they have sword belts
with buckles, to which the weapon is attached in away
that stamps them as Greeks.* It hangs, in fact, on the
left side, while the Romans carried the sword on the
right side. A high Roman official or military man, like
No. 22, would not have worn his sword on the left
side. This personage also had a gold clasp attached
to his hyacinth-purple cloak, and his hair was bound
by a golden bay wreath of a double row of leaves.
What would be the meaning of such a clasp on the
purple mantle of a Roman magnate — who, indeed, could
not have worn it ? But we know on trustworthy
authority that the Ptolemaic kings were wont to send
such clasps to the truyyeveis or " relatives " before men
tioned who were about their person, and that they
alone were entitled to wear them.f
* The sword itself, indeed, is not visible, but it must naturaUy
have hung at the end of the belt, which in three instances out of the
four passes over the right shoulder and across the breast to the left.
f Lumbroso, toe. cit., p. 190. Letronne, Recueil des inscrip
tions grecques et latines de I'Egypte, Paris, 1845-48, i, 349. In
ancient Egypt, too, the Pharaohs bestowed similar distinctions. In

70 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
In No. 6 only the golden wreath is absent ; his
sword also hangs from its belt on the left side. A
band of blood-colored purple lies across his white
chiton. The third wearer of the purple mantle has a
golden bay wreath with the leaves three and three.
He, too, has a sword on his left, hanging to a belt with
a golden clasp. In No. 5 there is no wreath, but the
hyacinthine cloak is fastened with a gold clasp; the
sword belt with the clasp lies almost horizontally across
the breast from left to right, very high up. In this one
the mouth more especially suggests that the subject
was of Semitic origin ; he may, perhaps, have quitted
the service of Rome to join the army of the Lagides.
We look in vain for any trace of hyacinth purple in
the dress of the other men and women. Any other
shades of this color are to us of no significance; but
the fact that the men who wear the mantles of hya
cinth purple are at the same time those, and those
alone, who carry a sword attached to a belt with a
buckle, and that three of them wear it in the Greek
fashion, on the left side, is strong evidence in support
of my opinion. Jewish captains were not unusual
under the Ptolemies ; Onia, under Philometer (-I-146),
is the best known.* What Roman general who would
allow himself to be entombed in the Hellenic fashion,
as a mummy with a portrait attached, can be conceived
of as wearing a hyacinth-colored mantle, a gold clasp
the biographical inscription deciphered by me of Amen em heb,
eighteenth dynasty, he is decorating the man standing next to him
with the order of the Golden Lion ; and Ahmes the Admiral has
been decorated in the same way just before.
* The Hellenic citizenship was also bestowed on Hebrews.
Josephus contra Apionem ii, 3.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 71
like an order, and his sword on the left instead of on
the right side ? — whereas under the later Ptolemies we
can hardly imagine a general and a " relative of the
king" in any other guise. These four important pic
tures are so admirably painted, that for this, if for no
other reason, they must be ascribed to the good early
period. The flowers and wreaths which adorn the various
female portraits are important as bearing on the date
of their execution only in so far as they prove that
the wearers were not Christians, but heathen, and
that mariy heathen formalities were observed in the
interment at least of some of them. As early as under
the Pharaohs the Egyptians loved to deck themselves
with flowers. They were used in quantities at every
festival, and the bodies both of men and women of the
royal family discovered at Der-el-Bahri were in many
cases dressed with flowers. Golden wreaths, too, like
those depicted in the portraits, were often placed on
the head of the corpse. H. Rhind found a particularly
fine one at Thebes, and has given a drawing of it.*
Garlands of papyrus were plaited with such grace and
lightness, that Plutarch of Agesilaus says he was so
delighted with one that was presented to him on his
arrival in Egypt that at his departing he begged to
have a second. We need not here dwell on the im
portance ascribed to wreaths in heathen times by the
Greeks and their successors, the Romans. They fell
into desuetude after the introduction of Christianity ;
and the mere way in which the mummies of Kerke
* H. Rhind, Facsimiles of Two Papyri found in a Tomb at
Thebes. London, 1863. PI. on p. 26, Fig. II.

72 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
were decked with garlands of gold and of flowers is
enough to prove that these portraits represented hea
then. The wreath worn by No. 9 is especially distinct
ive, because it is constructed exactly like the wreaths
of leaves found in the royal mummies at Der-el-Bahri.
A very good idea may be formed of these wreaths
(made of flowers which I can not pretend to determine
botanically) from the chains of flowers made by chil
dren by threading the tube of one blossom into the
heart of another (of lilac or of elder) till they make a
long string. Thus, in the floral decoration of a mummy
of the Pharaonic period, willow leaves were strung one
upon another till they formed a long chain which was
wound round the body. The woolen fillet and woolen
bands in Nos. 38, 9, and 25, as well as the ribbons in
other portraits, occur nowhere but on heathen Hellenic
effigies of pre-Christian date. The woolen fillet on the
head of the boy (?) No. 38, is essentially characteristic
of heathen Greek sculpture.
We also find cups represented in the hands of the
deceased, and the edicts of Theodosius prohibited the
use of garlands of flowers in the worship of the lares
and penates, and of the genius, a worship evidently
closely connected with the portraits in question.
To recapitulate, our conclusion may be summed up
in the following propositions:
All the portraits of the Graf collection represent
heathen men and women.
The earliest of them must have been painted in the
time of the Ptolemies and probably not later than the
second century before Christ.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

73

The Use of Portraits on Mummies lasted till
the Edicts of Theodosius, 392.
The edicts. Portraits of the time of Hadrian. The
dressing of the beard. The affinity of the portrait
mummies with other earlier forms of art.
I may thus regard it as proved that the custom of
attaching portraits to mummies began in the second
century before Christ and continued till the end of the
fourth century of the Christian era, when the Prefect
Cynegius began to enforce the edicts of Theodosius of
A. D. 385 in Syria and Egypt. In that of November
10, 392, it is ordered that no one, of whatever age or
rank, etc., shall anywhere bring a guiltless beast for
sacrifice, or do honor with sinful mysteries (in the
service of the dead), either to his lar by lighting a fire,
or to his genius by offering pure wine (without water),
or to his penates by offering fragrant spices, or by
burning lights or incense, or hanging up garlands of
flowers. And whoso should offend in. these and other
matters, his house and effects shDuld be confiscated as
the penalty.*
It must here be observed that the lar and the
genius to whom it is hereby forbidden to make various
ofierings, including flowers, were invoked in the form
of pictures of the deceased ; and that both, especially
the genius, corresponded nearly to the Egyptian Ka,
to which, in fact, the custom of placing portraits on the
mummies owed its origin, and which was, as it were,
one with it. * Codex Theod., xvi, 10, 12.

74 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
To facilitate the worship of the genius some of the
sarcophagi found in the necropolis in which mummies
had been laid were, as Stadler tells us, so constructed
that the lid could be opened ; and, as has been de
scribed above, the Ka or genius wore the form of the
deceased, which was made sensible to the worshiper
by means of the portrait. Hence the edict of Theo
dosius included these mummies. Several of these prove
to have been the bodies of high officials or of members
of their families. If such mummies had been prepared
after the promulgation of the edict the law would have
been broken, both by the attachment of the portrait
and by the floral adornments ; and we know for certain
that the portrait mummies were not secretl)'^ interred,
but quite openly conveyed and buried in the usual
public cemetery. We may therefore regard the end of
the fourth century as the date of the latest examples
of the class of mummies under consideration.
Between this terminus ad guem and the date of the
earliest portrait mummy lies a tolerably long space of
time, and a series of these portraits dates back to its
beginning, namely, the middle or end of the second
century before Christ. Several were painted under
Hadrian (a. d. ii 7-138). This is proved by various
coffins, and the labels, which were probably dug out
where the coffins were discovered. But the place
where the labels were found is known only of a few.
As to the two sarcophagi at Berlin already mentioned,
Wilcken has proved that the first contained the remains
of Phaminis, a grandson of Soter, the Archon of Thebes ;
Sensaos and Tkauthi, the sisters who lay in the other,
were Soter's daughters. " They certainly lived under
Hadrian. The pictures attached are of small value as

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

75

works of art, and differ from those in the Graf collec
tion, inasmuch as the children are depicted at full
length, and at the bottom inside the mummy case.
The six Paris portraits can not be identified, but they
are of about the same period. The mummy labels no
doubt belong to the first or second century after
Christ ; one, at any rate, most certainly, for the inscrip
tion is in the cursive of that time. They were, however,
not written till some time after the death of the person
designated, when the mummy was removed for burial.
Very possibly the labeling of mummies was not
practiced till Roman times; perhaps some of those in
scribed with uncial letters, and which it is impossible
to date, belong to the end of the Ptolemaic rule; and
perhaps by some accident none of the oldest have been
discovered. Heydemann has endeavored to prove
that most of these portraits were painted during or
after the reign of Hadrian, because this emperor was
the first to wear a beard, and most of the men in the
Graf collection also wear beards, whereas almost all
the Ptolemies were beardless. But I can not at all ac
cept his conclusions. The heads with the lock, which,
in my opinion, are those of men closely connected with
the Lagides, are beardless too ; and was it everthe law
or rule in ancient times that the subjects of the empire
— and that in a by no means particularly loyal province
— should cut their beards exactly by the pattern of
Caesar ? It would not be difficult to prove the very re
verse. The Ptolemies certainly for the most part wore
no beard, but the refractory Alexandrians can have
cared little about it ; and the Lagides were clean shaved
only because the tradition of the family required them
to appear as like the great Alexander as possible.

7^

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

On looking through Poole's beautiful catalogue of
Greek coins in the British Museum, we see that Philo-
pator has a small beard, and the brother of Auletes,
who governed Cyprus, has a fine full beard. It is in
deed quite possible to suppose that one or another of
the family may at times have adopted the fashion ; *
still they do, as a rule, appear clean shaved. At the
same time, the layman who looks through these photo
graphs of coins will be inclined to believe that the sov
ereigns were all bearded, for on half at least of the
specimens they had themselves represented, in imita
tion of Alexander, with a conventional resemblance to
Jupiter Ammon, with or without rams' horns, but al
ways with the thick beard with which we are familiar
from the heads of Zeus or Serapis. The men of riper
years are shown in these portraits with hair on the
upper lip and chin, but worn much shorter than is
usual on the images of the god. The youths are care
fully shaved.
The weakness of Heydemann's argument can be
shown by several examples. Antonius, the beardless
emperor's chief defender, wore a thick beard ; Seneca
grew a rather less fine one at the court of a beardless
Csesar ; and Hadrian, the first emperor who allowed
his beard and whiskers to grow — in order, it is said, to
hide a mole — did not persuade his brother-in-law Ser-
vianus to remain unshaved. He, so nearly allied to
Caesar, and to whom Hadrian's famous letter was ad
dressed from Alexandria, was represented in advanced
* Philometer is seen with his whole beard with Cleopatra I.
(Poole, Greek Coins, pt. xviii, 8), but it seems to be an adaptation
of the Zeus type.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

77

life in a bust with a hairless face. Private men of
wealth, such as figure for the most part in these por
traits, are rarely seen on monuments. In comic scenes
we find them wearing beards, even under beardless
sovereigns (relief in the Mus. Borbonico, Naples ;
Schreiber's Wiener Brunnen-reliefs, p. 25), and the coun
try folk in Hellenic Egypt wore both beards and mus
taches, as may be seen in a bas-relief from Alexandria
in the Munich Glyptothek ; it represents peasants on
their way to market, and certainly dates from before
the time of Hadrian.
Besides, if the Egyptians had in fact mimicked the
emperor's hair and beard or beardlessness, the women
must surely have copied the empress's curls. But
there is no sign of such a thing in any of the pictures,
and could hardly be, for the ladies of Alexandria, and
their husbands and fathers too, preferred their own
taste to that of the Romans. Nor were they wrong.
Their artists were in demand at Rome ; and in Cam
pania, where, in spite of the most fearful destruction
by nature, so much remains preserved by natural
means, we may most clearly see how deeply Alexan
drian art, especially in painting, influenced that of
Italy. If Heydemann's view were correct, the portraits
found there of important citizens, which were probably
painted under beardless emperors, and certainly long
before the time of Hadrian, would also show clean
shaven faces ; but the reverse is the case, for the por
trait which most resembles those in the Graf collection,
that of the baker and duumvir Paquius Proculus*

* Niccolini Nuovi Scavi. 1 mestieri e i Industrie dei Pompe
jani, Tav. i. 6

78

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

(who was painted with his wife on the wall of his tab
linum), the men playing draughts, etc., have mustaches
and short beards exactly like most of those of men of
riper years — Nos. 3-6, 20, 26, 28, 41, 44, 49, 50, 64, 69,
Graf collection — and like the busts of Hadrian, who
came to the throne thirty-eight years after the de
struction of Pompeii.
But a mummy belonging to R. Virchow * must de
cisively contradict Heydemann's suggestion, and two
others may be named with it. It is that of a great
personage of the tenth century before Christ, and he
wears a mustache and whiskers of which the cut pre
cisely resembles that in Nos. 3-6, 20, etc. (Graf collec
tion), and the busts of Hadrian. We see from this that
Egyptians of rank wore a short but complete beard at
a very early date — a thousand years before the first
bearded Caesar — and consequently that they did not
shave the lip and chin so universally as might be sup
posed from the Pharaonic monuments. Smoother faces,
and statues with small artificial beards, are only a con
ventional representation, in accordance with the typical
tradition of Egyptian art, of the old style of beard
which had long gone out of fashion. If the whole
beard of the Egyptians had been quite unheard of for
men of rank, Alexander and his successors would
hardly have allowed Jupiter Ammon to be repre
sented with it ; and on the national monuments it is
often replaced by the conventional artificial beard.
When the bearded image of Serapis was introduced
under the early Ptolemies, toward the end of the third
* R. Virchow. Bildertafeln aus agyptischen Grabem. Ver-
handl. der Berlin. Gesell. fiir Anthropologie, Jan. 19, i88g, p. 43.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

79

century before Christ, they readily accustomed them
selves to its worship.
The shape of the beard, then, can not be taken as a
chronological basis. Nor does it seem to me indis
pensable, for what we might learn from individual
details is sufficiently established by putting back the
history of the origin and subsequent use of the por
traits. In the ninth and eighth centuries before Christ the
custom had already become general of incasing the
mummy in one of those cartonnage, mummy-shaped
shells we have mentioned ; this was subsequently laid
in a wooden coffin, and sometimes in a stone sarcoph
agus. Even on the cartonnages the face of the dead
— a molded mask, gilt or colored — was applied, meant
certainly in many cases to be a portrait of the deceased.
This custom was at its height during the twenty-sixth
dynasty (b. c. ^64-5 25). It lasted through the Persian
period (b. c. 525-333), and after the conquest of Egypt
by Alexander the Great, till under the Ptolemies, when
Hellenism struck firm root on the shores of the Nile.
Th. Schreiber has lately devoted his attention with
signal success to the art of this period, and he says :
"It may be regarded as the leading feature of the art
under the successors of Alexander that in every de
partment, in architecture no less than sculpture, the
tendency toward painting is conspicuous. In this re
spect classic or Hellenic art may be compared to mod
ern art: it regards painting as of the first importance,
and gives it prominence above the plastic arts."
Thus, also, in the funereal monuments of the Hel
lenic Egyptians painting held the foremost place.
The face, formerly molded to adorn the coffin, was

8o THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
now painted on wood and glued to it. All the pro
cesses of art necessarily tended to this end when, after
the second century before Christ, the Hellenic popula
tion of Egypt had adopted the practice of mummifying
their dead. Under the later Lagides the supplying of
portraits for mummies corresponded to various similar
new uses of art ; under the Roman rule such a practice
would be singular and inexplicable, irrespective of the
fact that the second century after Christ produced no
painting worthy to compare with the best of the works
here under discussion. That the portraits should per
ish with the mummies they belong to is but natural,
and in many cases it may be assumed that the inferior
portraits are the latest.
This view gains support from the fact that the best
and therefore the oldest pictures are distinguished by
the most striking individualization, while those of the
time of Hadrian, though of the same class, have ac
quired such a typical stamp of features that a suspicion
of their having been ready painted for the purchaser
can not be dismissed without hesitation.
The more or less finish of the work is not, of course,
decisive as to their age, since at any time inferior
painters may have been employed by persons of less
wealth, till the edict of Theodosius made it a penal of
fense to inter the dead with such adjuncts.
These considerations, therefore, I believe support
the view, now sufficiently proved, that the earliest of
these portraits have come down to us from the time of
the later Ptolemies, about the middle of the second
century before Christ, and that the latest were painted
just before the promulgation of the edict of Theo
dosius. Those which were painted in and after the

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 8 1
time of Hadrian already betray a marked decadence.
And under the Antonines the practice of burial without
embalming began to prevail.

Hellenic Culture. Realism, and the Portraits
IN Question. Certain Portraits of Men.
If we now glance at the development of Greek,
and especially of Alexandrian, life in Egypt, with
special reference to the best of the Graf portraits —
which, as has been said, are undoubtedly the oldest —
we find that art, which must be regarded as a most im
portant factor in the characteristic features of that
life, was reciprocally influenced by its most striking
peculiarities, as we see in these very portraits.
How entirely practical that life was, how centered
in realism, is well known, and has lately been shown
with regard to its art. Some works of that time which
have come down to us remind us of similar paintings
of the present day by their delight in the naturalistic
representation of reality.
And yet they have not forfeited the joy in beauty
of an earlier age and of their native home; the art of
the Greeks in Egypt and of Alexandria has been rec
ognized and discussed as having a stamp of its own,
quite apart from portrait painting. One distinctive
characteristic is the clear and determined eye with
which it studies the object to be depicted, and en
deavors to represent it with realistic truth down to the
smallest details. Helbig, in his treatise on the mural
paintings of Campania, duly recognized the influence
of art under the successors of Alexander, with Alex-

82 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
andria for its center; and he is perfectly right when
he points out that this realistic technique on which I
am insisting may be discerned not only in the paint
ing but in the historical literature of the time. For
the historians under the Ptolemies no longer view the
personages of whom they write merely as historical
figures, but endeavor to give such details as may result
in a living picture, describing their appearance, and
even their dress and their manner of eating and drink
ing, and giving anecdotes of their peculiarities and
private life. The same realistic vein is found running
through every province of Alexandrian intellectual
culture. It may be considered as the precursor of the
methods of observation pursued in our own day ; and
in natural history especially the professors, attracted
to the court of the Ptolemies by the great museum,
abandoned the old systems and metaphysical illusions,
to concentrate their attention on actual phenomena in
a spirit of true research. No other school of philoso
phy has come so near our own in scientific matters.
While in the department of medicine, by operating on
condemned prisoners, they achieved the discovery that
the brain is the seat of the intellect, and mastered the
functions of the heart, vivisecting not only animals but
human beings in their pursuit of knowledge,* they
were also acquainted with the power of steam, had
* Tertullian (De Anima 70) tells of Herophilus, who came to
Alexandria in the reign of Ptolemy I Soter, that he had dissected
many men ' ' ut naturem scrutaretur." To disprove the theory that
there exists in the soul a fiyeiioi'iKiv, that is to say, a guiding prin
ciple, a higher, supreme entity, Asclepiades decapitated several
animals and removed the heart, to show that they could not continue
to live and feel.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 83
discovered the most important laws of mechanics, and
had applied the same methods to the measurement of
the earth which have been used ever since the time of
Eratosthenes to the present day.
Thus in Alexandria, under the Ptolemies, science
was enriched by conquests in many lines till then un
dreamed of, and hand in hand with the investigations
of students and the inventions of art commerce devel
oped on an enormous scale, including parts of the earth
as yet unvisited, and bringing together every people
and tribe of the known world.
Countless treasure flowed through the city into the
hands of its merchants — Greek, Semitic, and Egyptian ;.
every one in Alexandria adopted the use of the Greek
language and Greek manners, and, as the sovereign set
the example of interesting himself in the intellectual
struggle characteristic of the Hellenic race in every
land, the enriched merchants, shippers, and artisans
also cultivated science and art, and availed themselves
of their resources to add to the graces of life. In their
working hours they benefited by the discoveries of
inquiring spirits; they beguiled their hours of leisure
by taking part in the hair-splitting discussions of phi
losophers, theosophists, and other learned men ; the
wealthy employed their riches in paying artists to em
bellish their houses with works of genius in a style un
dreamed of elsewhere. We know now the genre pic
tures treating the landscape element in a quite new
way, with which the Alexandrians loved to decorate
the walls of their living rooms, we know, too, the
toy-like statuettes — among them the fruit sellers de
scribed by Schreiber — representing subjects from life
with wonderful realism and sometimes with extraordi-

84

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

nary truth, which were certainly wrought in Alexan
dria. And in like manner these portraits show how ear
nestly the Hellenic settlers in Egypt strove at that time
to give a likeness the utmost individuality and the
most realistic treatment. The ideal and the general
alike are necessarily cast into the background, for the
ideal must always lose in the struggle with the good
things of this life, and artistic generalization must
always give way before the claims of the individual.
These, again, are asserted more strongly as the culture
of his mind is higher, as his acquired wealth is greater,
and the prouder he is to regard himself as a patron
and employer, as a Maecenas, and a ready speaker in
the senate, or at the banquet enhanced by intellectual
pleasures. The newly invented poetic form of the idyl
aimed at the utmost possible truth in depicting the
aspects of reality ; to characterize them strikingly,
giving prominence to what was admirable, and exposing
what was mean, evil, and morbid, was the purpose of
the keenly pointed epigram. The arts of representa
tion no longer shrank from showing the defects of the
sitter. Those who are unable to visit museums, by
turning over the pages of Viscount's Iconography, may
see from the bust of the humpbacked ^sop how the
sculptors of the time displayed personal deformity, and
turned it to admirable profit in enhancing the intellec
tual character of the cripple. It is well known that
the youthful beauty of Alexander the Great was marred
by a wry neck, and the art of his day did not hesitate
to betray this malformation — still, in such a way that
it was lost in the appearance of swift action which dis
tinguishes that work, and which so well beseems the

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 85
conqueror of the world, whose whole short life was a
constant rush to be foremost, to overthrow, to seize,
and to hold.
If the artists of that day, while they tried to miti
gate the deformity of so great a man — to turn it to
account, indeed, and, as it were, to ennoble it — yet dared
not so far overstep the limit line of actuality as to ig
nore it altogether, the Hellenic painters were much less
likely to shrink from showing such defects without any
attempt at concealment, when the portrait represented
a private citizen. Truth to nature, that realism of
which Lysistratus was considered the boldest cham
pion, was the first requirement imposed on the portrait
painter, and the end he himself aimed at. This is con
vincingly shown by these pictures, one of which (Graf
collection. No. 26) happens to depict a malformation
similar to that of Alexander. It is that of a man of
middle age whose neck had grown awry; and Dr.
Muret, the well-known physician of Vevey, whose ob
servation is supported by the most distinguished med
ical men of Munich, was the first to point out that
here we have a case of pathological shortening of the
sterno-cleido-mastoid, and that the painter has rendered
with great skill the abnormal direction of the eyes
which commonly accompanies this deformity, in con
sequence of the effort to keep the line of sight level in
spite of the obliquity of the head. The most ignorant
are at once struck by the truth of this likeness of
some deformed Greek ; and yet the artist has been able
to avoid all repulsive ugliness in spite of the sincerity
of his work.
And we always find the same truthfulness as in this
case of pathological interest. There is not one among

86 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
the better pictures that does not carry the conviction
that these portraits are unflattered and speaking like
nesses ; and this is no less true of the coloring than of
the drawing and expression of the faces.
Compare the swarthy Graeco-Egyptian No. 50 — his
manly features, speaking eye, determined mouth, black
mustache and beard — with the delicate pink-and-
white complexioned girl No. 15, wearing a gold fillet
in her black hair and a necklace of precious stones,
and you will appreciate the artist's keen individualiza
tion and realistic handling. Still, it is not needful for
this to study so great a contrast as that between a
frail-looking girl, snatched away, perhaps, by lung
disease, and a strong man in the prime of life. We
may see it in any of the best paintings, and will first
examine those of men and boys.
Here are four portraits of citizens all past their
youth. No. 31 is a ruddy, dark man, whose black hair
and beard as yet show no gray. He must have been a
man of energy verging on fierceness, and not pleasant
to deal with. He was very certainly vehement and
determined, and when rebellion was in the air would
be one of the ringleaders. Such men must those
Egyptians have been of whom Flavius Vopiscus was
thinking when he described them as " a stormy, im
petuous, boastful, and criminal race, captivated like
children by any new thing, loving to sing satirical
songs in public, devoted to epigram and verse making,
and no less to mathematics, soothsaying, and quack
doctoring." No better illustration of this description can be im
agined than No. 31 (Graf collection), while No. 64, a
vigorous-looking man with some traces of Ethiopian

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 87
blood (to which we shall again refer), was no doubt com
petent to repress the revolt in which No. 31 would have
taken part. No. 64 was probably a government official,
for he wears a gold band on his woolly head. No. 20 is
a man of about fifty. His face, too, is brown, and a few
white threads are visible in his hair, mustache, and
beard ; this is cut in the fashion of the time, somewhat
short, and in such a shape as to prolong the oval of
the face. He was perhaps of Semitic race — Hebrew or
Phcenician — and his bright, shrewd eye assures us that
he was a capable official or man of business. It needed
greater provocation to stir him to wrath than would
have enraged No. 31, and we can conceive of him as
a trustworthy friend and good father of the house
hold. The fine man No. 21 has lately attracted much in
terest. Lenbach regards it as the best of all the por
traits. It represents a man not much past the bloom
of youth. His hair falls in natural and perhaps not
unintentional disorder over his brow ; and if we study
all the features of his not unpleasing but impulsive
face, and not merely the bold, alert eyes and the sen
suous mustachioed lips, we may regard it as that of a
headstrong man who nevertheless was ready enough
to yield when necessary for the gratification of un
bridled desires. This man looks as though he still
stood in the midst of " storm and stress," and far away
from that inward harmony which middle life was sup
posed to bring to the philosophically cultured Greek.
The original of this portrait cared nothing for the
Stoa — nay, hardly even for Aristippos, who, however,
taught the avoidance of no pleasure; reflection was
not in his nature. He stands in the midst of life ; he

88 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
would clutch passionately, and, if needful, snatch vio
lently, anything that promised enjoyment.
The sitter from whom a less skilled and less sym
pathetic artist painted No. 44 was undoubtedly of
Semitic origin. He is a man of wealth, and about thirty
years of age ; but beyond this the picture tells us little
but that he was a man of the world and of sensuous
tastes. His low forehead is not that oi a thinker ; his
full lips are formed to relish the material pleasures of
life ; the nose and eyes are those of the financier of
our own day, and, like so many of these, he, too, knew
how to dress with elegance. The care bestowed by
the painter on his white and crocus-colored upper robe
with a large gold brooch on the shoulder * may perhaps
have afforded him such satisfaction as to counterbal
ance his annoyance at the flat modeling of his features.
We may here glance at another symbolical ornament,
worn by a woman. No. 96. It is a crescent or half
moon, with a star hanging from a chain on each side of
it. It marks the wearer as participating in the mys
teries or the worship of Isis or some kindred goddess.
Gnostic symbols were of the same type.
Next comes a pair of aged men. No. 2 is a thinker,
learned but not prone to talk ; or, if he were a mer
chant, a grave and cautious manager of his business,
who in his leisure hours would take up a favorite
author — Aristotle and Zeno rather than Plato or Epi
curus. No. 36 is a man of sixty, with a rough gray
beard, brows that meet in the middle, and large, defiant
looking eyes — the sort of face we attribute to a cynic
* Not a clasp, such as those who bore the title of crvyyfVeh, or
relatives of the Ptolemies, were allowed to display.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

89

philosopher who purposely neglects the outer man, and
who, by his disputatious temper, would have been a
pike among the carp in the stagnant pool of the phi
losophers of his time.
Nos. 4 and 22 (like Nos. 5 and 6) wear the hyacinth-
purple mantle, and this and the diadem on their brows
(as in No. 61) mark them as magnates in the state.
No. 22 has, as has been said, the clasp bestowed as an
" order " on those men of high rank who enjoyed the
title of " relations of the sovereign." They all wear
their hair and beard in the same fashion : the beard
and mustache clipped short, and under the mouth a
tuft of hair is left, known to modern barbers as an
" imperial." No. 4 has the aristocratic features of a
young patrician in the early thirties, with the expres
sion of calm indifference ^o common in those favored
mortals who from their youth up have been abundantly
endowed with all the good gifts for which their inferiors
in rank often strive in vain. The pear-shaped head
has a certain reposeful dignity, but a keen spirit looks
out of the open eyes. If this man held office, very
little can ever have escaped his notice, and they were
unwise who defied his will. The sword belt has already
been discussed. The head No. 61, which also wears a
gold diadem, and is painted on a gold ground, recalls
the Coptic type so often seen in Egypt. The subject
may have been of Egyptian race, and the expression of
the face plainly shows that life was not so sweet to
him as to other wearers of the diadem who were
buried by his side — nay, that it had often been full of
bitterness. I may here reiterate the remark that, as
the inscriptions, etc., prove, provincial magnates even
in Cyprus were among the officials and courtiers who

no THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
enjoyed the titles of " relations," " messmates," and
" friends " of the Ptolemaic sovereigns.
In Nos. 27 and 47 we have two boys who, though
scarcely past their school days, cherish, if in vain, the
first downy promise of a mustache ; but how unlike
are they save in this respect ! No. 27 is the dark-olive
son of rich parents, of Egyptian race, and perhaps
princely birth, for gold foliage is twined with his black
hair. Defiance and sensuality accentuate his full lips,
self-reliance sparkles in his large dark eyes, and though
his portrait has been much damaged it still enables us
to look into the soul of a youth untroubled by any
thought of death, who enjoyed all the pleasures of his
age and was already satiated with some. Quite dif
ferent is No. 47. Here we have a face of light com
plexion, with hair cut straight over the forehead. Softer
boyish features are hardly conceivable, and yet this
youth was not easily led; the thin and firmly set lips
betray a stubborn will. His tutor may have found it
hard to discipline this pupil, for a faint tinge of mel
ancholy shrouds the sweet, purely Greek countenance.
It would be easy to believe that the delicate blossom
of manhood foresaw its early end. If these portraits
were removed from the living room, or copied from
pictures there, the youths represented can hardly have
been much older when they died, for if they had hved
to riper years, they would, in view of their rank — as
regards No. 27 at least — have been painted again later.
No. 27 would never have stooped to base sensuality ;
of No. 47 we can hardly say so much.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. qi

Portraits of Women. Their Merit as Works of
Art. Eyes and Artificial Darkening of the
Eyes. The Two Beauties Nos. 45 and 8. Con
clusion.
And now for the women ! On them our artists
have lavished their utmost skill, and show us types of
remarkably diverse individuality and of the greatest
charm. First we have two matrons, Nos. 42 and 43.
The former is a Greek of rather less or more than
forty, who in her youth must have been one of the
great beauties of the place, for she is still dignified and
attractive with her abundant, almost luxuriant, gray
hair, and dark, calmly victorious eyes, which look out
with self-confident reserve. No. 43 is quite another
woman. She, too, is Greek, and in her youth may have
had some pretensions to beauty; but sufferings had
evidently blighted her prematurely and turned her
from worldly vanities. While No. 42, like most of the
female portraits here, wears pearls in her ears and gold
necklaces. No. 43 has not even the humblest ornament.
Her hair is arranged with the utmost simplicity, and
her eyes, once bright but now so sunken, bear witness
to intense suffering of mind or body. No. 42 is the
dominant and honored mother and matron ; No. 43 a
heartbroken woman to whom grief has come through
her husband, and perhaps through her children.
The most charming and pleasing group of all is the
series of portraits of young girls which have lain hidden
so long in the dusty, silent tombs of Rubaiyat. A
mournful feeling creeps over us when we reflect that
so many lovely and happy lives must have fallen, still

Q2 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
so young, victims to the reaper Death; and as we gaze
at these pictures we may well believe that it was for
the comfort they might bring that the ladies of Hel
lenized Egypt were painted in the bloom of youth —
as brides, perhaps — to grace the homes of their parents,
or of their husband, and subsequently to be copied for
the decoration of the mummy.
As to the artistic merits of these paintings of young
women, it is certainly not too much to say that they
have all the best qualities which charm us in the finest
of these portraits; the features are exquisitely mod
eled, they are accurately and elegantly drawn, and
the coloring may be called harmonious, though at first,
it is true, the encaustic wax medium has perhaps a
rather startling effect. But that which gives these
pictures their chief value is the convincing power
which reveals the individual character of every one
represented. The utmost care is bestowed on the
countenance, hardly any on the costume. These
speaking and marvelously lifelike images are full of
captivating charm ; they move us now to real delight,
now to sympathetic liking ; one reminds us of a face,
a type such as we meet with in daily life; another
raises the irresistible smile with which we see a vulgar
sitter depicted with intelligence and skill.
Few shades from the spectrum of female beauty
are missing from this series ; and they alone are suf
ficient to demonstrate what various means nature can
use to produce the attractive and fascinating thing
which we know as a lovely girl ; but they also prove
how closely our sense of beauty is akin to that of the
Greeks, for the charming faces on which the Hellenic
painters have here lavished their devoted care would

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

93

have been welcomed as models by Kaulbach and Len
bach, by Alma Tadema or Poynter.
But before proceeding I must here answer one often
raised objection. When I just now used the word
startling, it was with reference not only to the encaus
tic method of painting but also to the apparent dis
proportionate size of the eyes, which in many even of
the male portraits are almost obtrusive. Knowing, as
we do, how emphatically Greek authors insist in many
passages on the power of the eye as the mirror of the
soul, and how the ancient Egyptians endeavored to
enhance the brilliancy of the eye by inserting into
their statues eyes of feldspar and other substances, we
can not but ascribe the treatment of the eyes in these
portraits to some reason not directly concerning the
painter. In point of fact, from the very earliest times
Egypt was the land of " making up " the eye. So early
as the middle kingdom (twelfth dynasty before Christ
down to the third century before Christ) we find a
Semitic tribe sending " eye-salve " or paint as an ac
ceptable offering to the prince of an Egyptian nome.
But it was in use long before this. Virchow was the
first to discern that certain colored statues of the first
kingdom had on their eyelids and round the eyes black
lines precisely similar to those applied by the Egyptian
women to this day. They may be seen, on the fine
portrait statues of Rahotep and Nerfert (sixth dynasty)
discovered at Medum and preserved at Bulak ; these are
coeval with the oldest pyramids. And other strongly
individualized statues of that period have painted eyes
(Ranefer, fifth dynasty, Bulak, and others).
Virchow's observations as to the method of " mak
ing up" the eyes bears on these portraits also.
7

Q4 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
" The black mesdem was used not merely to darken
the edges of the eyelids, but the eyebrows as well, and
the line was carried on toward the temples a long way
beyond the eye itself. This gave sharpness and dis
tinctness to the outline ; but it was also intended to
attract the attention of the beholder in such a manner
as to make that part of the face predominant over the
rest. The lines of color exaggeraited the almond shape
of the eyes beyond what was natural; . . . and how
greatly it can change the whole expression of the face
may best be seen in living women."
These words of the great anthropologist * account
for the startling effect of many of these pictures. The
artist simply reproduced what he saw before him, and
the sitters, even of the male sex, all made up their eyes
in the fashionable manner. They had not unnaturally
large eyes ; it was the painting which accentuated and
enlarged the outline that made them appear so. Hence
this peculiarity which has been adduced to prove their
insincerity is in fact the faithful representation of what
they actually saw.
Returning to our survey, we are first attracted by
Nos. 63 and 19. They represent two happy-looking
darlings of Greek homes, hardly at the age of woman
hood, and best described by the English phrase of
" sweet seventeen." No. 63 was the child of wealthy
and aristocratic parents, for an elegantly wrought
golden wreath rests lightly on her brown curls, and
she wears a necklace of fine and costly pearls. How
frankly the bright eyes gaze out on life ! and the lips
* R. Virchow. Altagiptische Augenschwarze. Verh, dM Ber
liner Ges. fiir Anthropologie, May 26, 1888, p. 211.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

95

have just a little roguish pout, and childlike innocence
is sweetly harmonized with a bright, eager intelligence.
No. 19 is much more simply dressed, and wears no
jewels; only the soft wavy hair falls round her small
head in loose flowing abundance. The brain behind
that smooth brow is less quick to perceive and think
than in No. 63, but there is no lack here of mother
wit ; on the contrary, it shines brightly out of the
large dark eyes. And the pert nose and coral lips,
executed with wonderful dash and precision with a
few touches of the brush — the picture is in tempera —
are perfectly matched in this pretty, soubrettelike
face. We take Nos. 17 and 55 together for the sake of
contrast. Although No. 55 is far inferior to many
others, it is a very convincing and characteristic pre
sentment of a girl of sixteen or seventeen. She is of
Hellenic birth, as we see from the chiseled and thor
oughly Greek nose and very fair complexion. This
delicate creature, as yet hardly in her bloom, looks
anaemic, and the difference in her eyes, represented with
wonderful skill, the thin, timid mouth, the flaccid soft
ness of the cheeks, give a truthful expression of the
weariness this young creature milst often have suffered
from. The black wavy hair, done up high on her
head, has an inelastic appearance, and the little orna
ment placed in the middle almost looks as if it had
been lost there. But No. 17 ! If we place it by the
side of No. 55, we could fancy that it shrugged its
shoulders over its pale, apathetic companion ; for here
all is life and health. She knows full well that she is
reckaned a beauty, and she would give a lesson to any
audacious and unwelcome lover.

96

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

But she found her " valentine " at an early age.
Those eager lips would hardly endure long waiting for
a first manly kiss. A bad accident has unfortunately
destroyed part of the upper portion of the left side of
the face ; but the right eye remains to show with what
keen enjoyment this bright young creature looked for
ward to existence. As we gaze on the vivid coloring
of these healthy features, and at the hardly suppressed
audacity that stamps their expression, we feel sure the
body as well as the soul of this young girl had never
known any form of sorrow or pain. Where pleasure
was to be culled she would be found, as certainly as in
household life she would be ready to help and capable
in her undertakings. She would spare no trouble for
her own advantage, or to be one of the best dressed
maidens at any festival ; for, though her earrings and
necklace are none of the finest, her black hair is
dressed in a manner that has cost her much time, and
pains. At first sight this coiffure looks like a cap,
with curly locks escaping from beneath it ; but if we
compare it with No. 8, on which it has been painted
with greater care and remains in better preservation,
we perceive that it is composed of long rows -of care
fully twisted small curls, fixed in their place, as it would
seem, by wires and covered with a net; this in No. 8
seems to have been spangled with red stones, garnets
or carnelian. This elaborate and rather barbarous
.mode of hairdressing and her dark skin lead us to
suppose that this damsel was an Egyptian by birth ;
though No. 8, who wears the same coiffure — and to
whom we shall presently return — has a purely Greek
cast of features. In searching for a similar style of
headdress elsewhere I found something resembling it

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 57
on early Egyptian monuments, and others almost ex
actly like it in Greek heads from Cyprus, which in the
time of the Ptolemies was closely connected with
Egypt.* It need not be decided whether the fair is
landers borrowed the fashion from their Egyptian
sisters, or vice versa, or whether each independently
evolved this elaborate coiffure, which in many cases
suggests a wig. Nor is there anything to contradict
this hypothesis, since young men wore wigs by the Nile
at a very early date. Some indeed remain, and are
preserved in our museums ; several were found with
the royal mummies at Der-el-Bahri.
No. 12 wears her hair in a similar but somewhat
stiffer fashion. Her features seem to bear a stamp of
Semitic parentage, and it is the same with Nos. 53 and
59. But how different otherwise are these three young
faces ! What they have in common are their intensely
black and crisply waving hair, dark eyes, and, for such
yjjung faces, rather prominent noses ; but while, in No.
12, we see a clear-headed and rational person of grave
intelligence, not deficient, however, in certain graces
of mind — as we may judge from the admirably mod
eled and expressive mouth — in No. 59 we see, perhaps,
the light-hearted child of a rich family, expecting much
of life, and promising to become a gentle and even-
tempered wife to her future husband. Her companion,
No. 53, was a damsel never at a loss for an answer.
Those lips were certainly ever ready with a disdainful
retort, and her spirit was as certainly not easily con
tented and satisfied.
* Cesnola. A Descriptive Atlas — On Various Female Heads.
See, too, the German edition by L. Stern for two similar heads. PI.
30 and 72.

98

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

No. II was quite different. This girl, the daughter
^of Semitic rather than of Egyptian parents, had a kind
and cheerful soul ; a genial, bright nature is revealed
in the firm and rather heavy chin, and soft, readily
smiling mouth. Her right eye seems to have had a
slight cast, but she certainly was not ill-looking, and
even if her appearance was not attractive she must
have been loved and sought after, for it is beyond a
doubt that she would give to all the best she had to
give, and be ever ready to rejoice with the joyful. In
this respect, however, No. 32 may have excelled her.
This little round face is familiar to us all, and asso
ciated with our happiest hours. Eyebrows that meet
are apt to lead us to expect a grave or gloomy temper,
but in spite of them, and although her other features
can not be called beautiful. No. 32 strikes us as amia-
tle, capable, and cheerful. If No. 11 could laugh sym
pathetically and take a warm-hearted and affectionate
interest in what others felt, No. 32 could provoke
mirth ; many an ingenious jest and harmless merry
quip must have had birth in that little round head,
decked so saucily and so becomingly with a row of
coins hanging from a chain.
And now we come to the gems of the collection —
Nos. 8 and 45. It is difficult to find words that will do
justice to the charm which these delightful portraits
never fail to exert on the beholder, and I should feel
confident indeed of my readers' gratitude if instead of
a mere description I could place before them a repro
duction of these pictures. The eyes of No. 45, into
which I have gazed long and often, haunt me still,
and others have had the same experience. They are
indeed unique. It is not that there is anything mys-

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. gg
tical or uncanny about them, not that their victorious
self-confidence brings the adorer to his knees — far
from it. This noble, maidenly creature looks forth,
unconscious of her irresistible beauty, without a sign
of effort to attract or to please — looks at the spectator
with the repose of indifference. Sheer waste of time
would it be for her, so secure of admiration, to try to
win it ! An indescribably noble and lofty air pervades
her whole being.
This much-adored maiden has no instinct of co
quetry, because every grace and gift which the vainer
sort desire is showered into her lap ; because she has
but to show herself to win every heart. She never
purposes conquest, but it is her happy fortune to con
quer wherever she appears, and she involuntarily holds
her head erect with lofty pride. He on whom these
unfathomable deep black eyes had rested, with their
freely arched, strongly marked brows, and indescriba
bly pure, frank, guileless gaze, so bright and yet so
soft — he is a captive forever. With how loving a hand
has the goddess of grace herself smoothed that oval
cheek, and how happily has the artist succeeded in
rendering it, and the finely curved mouth — full of
sweetnes,s, but closed with dignified reserve ! Her
hair, not crisped but broadly waving, dark and Greek,
is lightly piled in a high mass of unadorned but impos
ing curls. It covers her temples, and leaves no more
of her forehead visible than a triangle rounded above
and framed in an arch by two full waves of hair. The
nose, Greek in form, finely modeled, and not too slen
der, harmonizes with the rest of this bewitching face,
delicate in every feature, small and weak in none. But
those eyes — I come back to them — they illuminate the

100 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
whole; in this firmament where so much is lovely they
are as the sun which none can forget on whom they
have shone. How fair a maid ! And just as she beams
on us after more than two thousand years from the
painted panel, she might appear in the flesh, as secure
of admiration and homage as in her own day and
country. Apelles might have taken her for a Roxana
or a Galatea, a German or French painter of our time
for a Philippine Welser, or for the beautiful Queen
Louise, if her portrait had been lost. This girl's like
ness, preserved from a long past age, affords convinc
ing evidence of the universal and perennial truth of a
real standard of beauty.
No. 8 is not far inferior to No. 45, little as they re
semble each other in details. They have in common,
indeed, the charming oval outline and the harmonious
concord of every detail ; but while No. 45 is of purely
Greek ancestry, it is conceivable that No. 8 may have
some infusion of Egyptian blood ; her skin has the
tawny glow peculiar to the fairest Egyptian women,
whom we find depicted as yellow even on the earliest
monuments, and her hair is dressed in a fashion re
sembling that of the time of the Pharaohs, which would
hardly have found imitators among the Greeks ; indeed,
the rolls of little curls which I have already described
as caplike, and the net that covers them, beaded with
garnets, carnelian, or red jasper, are far more Egyp
tian than Greek. Many ladies of Cyprus, as I have
said, adopted a similar fashion. It is not becoming,
and the fact that the face represented in No. 8 is so
unmistakably attractive in spite of it, speaks eloquently
for its winning sweetness. This damsel's eyes, too, are
worthy of all praise, though we are tempted to ascribe

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. loi
the magic charm of her likeness as much to the really
bewitching mouth as to the eyes. The expression of
No. 45 is that of a lofty soul ; of No. 8 it is that of a
bright and affectionate heart. The nose is here a mas
terpiece ; its delicate contour combines with the mouth
and eyes to produce a delightful whole, and leads us
to believe with entire conviction in the spiritual charm
of the lovely young creature before us. What an inno
cent, loving, and happy heart must have throbbed in
this girl's breast ! — a gentle and obedient daughter, an
affectionate companion to her younger brothers and
sisters, a devoted and unfailingly patient wife to the
happy husband of her choice! Vehement passions can
scarcely have disturbed her sunny equanimity ; but if
her tender heart was captivated she would be constant,
for there is in her expression something true and cling
ing, which indicates that her pretty head was furnished
with a clear and quick intelligence. Nay, in this re
spect she was, perhaps, the superior of the fairest of the
fair — No. 45.
I must here end my remarks on individual portraits,
though with regret ; for each in turn tempts us to
study its peculiar characteristics, each tells its own
story. Setting aside the really inferior paintings, exe
cuted probably for poorer citizens by journeymen
painters, if we look only at the considerable number of
works by really skilled artists, we are compelled in the
first place to express our astonishment at finding that
in Egypt, of all countries — the home of conventional
art, where painting was fettered by a canon of drawing
and execution — such portraits as these could be pro
duced, and attached to objects so purely Egyptian as
mummy cases. But surprise vanishes when we reflect

I02 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
that under Hellenic rule Greek art was able at an early
date to amalgamate with Egyptian art, in sculpture as
well as in painting, the cultured classes yielding from
the first to the influence of the race which now held
the supremacy in their native land, and which, in all
that related to the higher intellectual life, was so far
in advance of themselves. Greek had become the lan
guage of literature and fashion in the upper ranks, and
though the peasantry and laboring class may have
clung to the mother tongue of their forbears — as in
Alsace they clung to German under French rule — even
under the Lagides it soon assimilated a quantity of
words from the Hellenic and other languages, preserved
to us in the Coptic, which is ancient Egyptian as it was
written in the Greek character after the Christian era.
In philosophy and aesthetic learning the Egyptians of
that time tried to resemble the colonists as much as
possible, though in all other respects they adhered
tenaciously to their national traditions and ancestral
possessions. The settlers, on the other hand, boasted
of their Hellenic origin, but, as has been shown, they
degenerated from the lofty idealism of their race, and
eagerly embraced the realistic tendency which was
paramount at Alexandria in every manifestation of
material and intellectual vitality.
Still, this realism had its ideal, and that was truth.
These portraits bear more convincing witness to the
fact than any other works of art preserved to us
from that period ; for, while they are quite free from
any idealizing sentiment and from the typical tradition
which stamps every work of this class surviving from
an earlier time, on the other hand, they show not the
slightest trace of the conventional rigidity imposed by

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 103
rule and canon on early Egyptian art. They are not
even affected by the premeditated purpose often seen
in the late antique ; for the only purpose that guided
the hand of these painters was the desire to represent
the living model with the most convincing sincerity
and truth, to make the work "alive," as Daneker ex
pressed it when modeling the bust of Schiller. And
this aim concerned not merely the outer form, but the
whole spirit and temperament of the person depicted.
Hence each one of these portraits is a study of char
acter; as we examine them we feel ourselves face to
face with nature, and can read in their features — in
which the artist has not failed to show every congenital
defect as well as every beauty — the inmost faults and
weakness of the original. There is here, I repeat, no
canon, no tradition, no idealizing treatment, to be al
lowed for or set aside ; we may accept unconditionally
the record of the paintings, and they are executed
with such astonishing truth to nature — not, however,
excluding great dignity of treatment — that we can feel
no doubt of their absolute fidelity. Notwithstanding
their great antiquity, and the ethnological peculiarities
of several, they appeal to us as fellow-men such as we
may meet in the course of daily life ; and what we see
before us so rivets our attention that how it was
painted becomes a secondary question.
I have left the discussion of this point to a professor
of the art, Herr Donner von Richter. It may, however,
be observed that the artistic merit of the best of Herr
Graf's portraits is acknowledged with enthusiasm by
the most famous living painters. Meissonnier — now,
alas, no more — Von Lenbach, CJabriel Max, Adolf Men-
zel, Knauss, and many more, have paid them a warm

I04 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
tribute of admiration, and have copied some. We
might suspect that the effects were produced by a
method of painting with wax and fusion by heat, for
the results ascribed by classic writers to pictures exe
cuted in wax colors must have some foundation in fact.
One of the most pleasing utterances on the subject to
be found in ancient literature is contained in one of
the songs ascribed to Anacreon, in which the poet
challenges his friend, a painter, to depict his mis
tress :
" Paint me my mistress with her soft black tresses,
and, if the wax consent, paint them breathing of
myrrh." The lines suggest No. 45, whose raven locks must
certainly have been anointed with fragrant unguents.
It is hard to tear ourselves from these men and
women, young and old, who had all come to rest to
gether in the favorite burial place on the shore by
Kerke. The instinctive feeling which prompted the
adornment of the mummy with an image of the dead
is very ancient ; it spread to the oasis from the Nile
Valley, where the mummies were decorated with a
modeled mask instead of a painting, as has been de
scribed above. Even in our own fin de siecle it still is
strong, especially in Italy, where, in the campo santo
and the cemetery, we often see portraits in relief and
busts of the dead of really appalling realism ; nay,
photographs of the dead who rest below are not unfre
quently displayed on the humbler graves.
How little can the Hellenic Greeks, who had these
pictures painted of the beloved dead, ever have dreamed
that two thousand years later the barbarians of the
inhospitable north would derive from them new ideas

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS. 105
of the artistic proficiency of the painters of that day,
and be prompted to study their spiritual life from their
outer man.

Conclusion.

With an abstract and appreciation of the views put forward
by Flinders Petrie.
The principal results of this dissertation, and of the
excavations at Hawara conducted by Mr. Flinders
Petrie, may be summed up as follows :
The necropolis whence most of the portraits in the
Graf collection were obtained belonged to the Graeco-
Egyptian river port of Kerke, in the Fayum. Those
brought to Europe by Flinders Petrie and other dis
coverers were found in the district of Hawara, which
may now be confidently designated as the town where
once the Labyrinth existed. Here the dead were en
tombed from the time of the middle kingdom till that
of the Roman supremacy.
Towards the end of the dynasty of the Lagides
that of Kerke seems to have been chiefly used by the
citizens of Arsinoe, while under the Romans, Hawara,
which was nearer, seems to have been preferred by
them. The persons interred were for the most part Hel
lenized Egyptians of Greek origin, but we find among
them Graeco-Egyptian half-breeds, others with an ad
mixture of Ethiopian blood, and a rather large propor
tion of Semitic race — Jews and Phoenicians.
The portraits were originally painted for family

I06 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
use in the home. Some were removed to be attached
to the mummy; but most of them seem to have been
copies on panels of cypress or sycamore wood, from
originals painted in fresco on the wall of a room.
All these portraits were undoubtedly done for hea
then purposes.
The period of their execution ranges from the sec
ond century before Christ — probably about the middle,
but possibly not before the last years of it, under the
Ptolemies — to the time of the edict of Theodosius, in
the last decade of the fourth century after Christ.
I greatly regret that the work by Flinders Petrie
on the portraits found by him at Hawara only came
into my hands when the foregoing remarks were al
ready completed.* He ascribes all the portraits, among
them the finest now at Bulak and in the National Gal
lery, London, to the Roman period. With regard to
the greater number he is undoubtedly right ; but per
haps he may think that the reasons I have given justify
us in referring the oldest to the second century before
Christ. His theory that these carefully adorned portrait
mummies were preserved in a room in the family
dwelling before being transferred to the necropolis I
am quite ready to accept, for it also accounts for the
very careless interment of mummies on which so much
expense had been lavished. The nearest surviving
relations cherished them piously and kept them near
them, but a later generation made room for the more
* The reader who has not immediate access to Hawara, by W.
Flinders Petrie, London (A. Tuer, 1890), is referred to a cheap and
comprehensive little volume by the same author. Ten Years' Dig
ging in Egypt, Religious Tract Society, London, 1893.

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

107

recently dead by depositing the older mummies in the
necropolis, where they were hastily covered with sand !
The labels were not attached until their removal for
burial ; and as the first — and perhaps the second — gener
ation gave the mummy of the beloved dead houseroom
in the family mortuary chamber, to be near the " coun
terfeit presentment," of which they worshiped the Ka
by offering it incense, these labels were not inscribed
till some long time after the death of the person to
whom they were attached for transport. We may
therefore, perhaps, assume that many of the labels were
not filled up till several years after the painting of the
portraits. As to whether the mummies found in the tombs
at Rubaiyat-Kerke were deposited there immediate
ly after death or not till later, no opinion can be
formed. The mode of interment remained unaffected by
political events, and to distinguish here between what
is of late Ptolemaic date and what is Roman, is only
possible by basing our judgment not merely on the
general aspect of the pictures but on a careful study of
every minute detail. The amulets found on Petrie's
mummies support the notion that all the portrait mum
mies inclose the remains of heathen, placing it, indeed,
beyond question. My terminus ad quern coincides very
nearly with his ; he gives no reasons, but fixes the
period of Constantine the Great (+337).
The evidence that the group of portraits which
include the best must have been painted in the time of
the Ptolemies, is to be found in records which prove to
a demonstration that so early as in the second century
before Christ Hellenic Egyptians of Greek extraction

I08 THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
were preserved as mummies and interred in the Egyp
tian manner.
It is also proved by the artistic merits of the por
traits. And, in the third place, the highly realistic treatment
of the best, and therefore the earliest, can hardly have
been the work of any other period than the second
century before Christ. It seems impossible to ascribe
it to any other epoch of Greek art before or since.
The realism we here discern, and which was then
prominent not in art alone but in learning and in
every aspect of life, obliges us to assign this date for
the execution of these pictures. It would be as diffi
cult to account for their origin in a post-Christian era
as it is natural to ascribe it to a period not too long
after the final amalgamation of Egyptian and Greek
life in Alexandria. At the time when Flinders Petrie
supposes that they were painted, the art was decidedly
in its decadence, and could hardly have been spurred
on to produce any such innovation as we are here con
sidering. The period I assume is further supported by indi
vidual peculiarities.
Those which represent men wearing the "lock of
youth" are portraits of "relations" of the king, who
demonstrably belonged to the court circle of the Ptol
emaic sovereigns, and who were not rarely natives of
the province and of Egyptian blood, whose fathers
filled important posts, religious, political, or military.
The only four dignitaries buried at Kerke (Rubai
yat), since they wear mantles of hyacinth purple, and
the sword attached to a belt with gold clasps hanging
on the left side, in opposition to the Roman habit of

THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.

109

wearing it on the right, could not possibly have lived
and been painted at any other period.
Finally, my views as to the date of the pictures is
confirmed by other similar portraits found elsewhere,
and by certain clauses in the edict of Theodosius.
Many, indeed, of the portraits found at Hawara,
and some of those from Rubaiyat, were painted during
the Roman imperial rule. Those which were done at
the time of Hadrian are inferior as works of art to the
finest in the Graf collection, or the best of those
brought home by Flinders Petrie ; they seem, indeed, to
prove that far less care was devoted to the portraits
for mummies in the second century after Christ than
at an earlier date, for the archon for whom they were
executed was a man of consequence ; the art of paint
ing had also begun to decline. Many of the latest
portraits seem to indicate that at last people were sat
isfied to attach to the mummy any picture of a person
of about the age of the deceased instead of a real por
trait. Between the best of the Graf collection and the
linen shrouds on which a face was painted there lies as
wide an interval as between the head on a fine coin of
the Ptolemies and that on a solidus of Constantine the
Great. The form and value of the various objects found by
Flinders Petrie on some of the portrait mummies bear
ample witness to the rank and position of the deceased,
I need only mention the fine ivory casket laid in one
lady's grave, and a litter with windows, borne by slaves,
which was buried with another. It is only of terra
cotta, but it was to save her from going on foot even
in the other world, just as the ushabti figures buried
with her ancestors were to till the fields for them.

IIO THE HELLENIC PORTRAITS.
The opinion based on the golden ornaments, strings of
pearls, and rich textiles shown in many portraits is
hereby confirmed.
The panel with a portrait on each surface is as im
portant as the extraordinarily various quality and
style of the paintings in showing how long the prac
tice of adding portraits to the mummy cases must have
continued.

THE END.

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9

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