SHE’S no picture postcard. Her nose is crooked, her chin too pronounced and
her hairstyle, frankly, is bizarre. But there’s something about the woman known
only as AES74713. Looking into her eyes is an unsettling experience. Perhaps
that’s because they are windows into the soul of a person who lived and died
nearly 2000 years ago.
AES74713 and a thousand other portraits like her, dating from 1st and 2nd
century Egypt, are said to be the oldest accurate pictures of the human face.
Known as the Fayum portraits, they depict men and women in classical poses with
strong references to Greek and Roman culture. The images are seen as haunting
evocations of past lives and an unrivalled record of the fashions of their day.
But how reliable is this information? New research indicates that not all the
portraits can be taken at face value. It seems some sitters were trying to
portray themselves as something other than their true selves.
The Fayum is a lush green area about 100 kilometres west of Cairo. Following
the conquest of Egypt by Alexander the Great in 332 BC this region was settled
by an elite society of Greek businessmen and officials. They gradually adopted
the Egyptian practice of mummification, wrapping embalmed bodies in the
elaborate cocoon of linen bandages that was fashionable at the time. These
European newcomers made one distinctive innovation, though: after binding the
mummy they laid over its head a portrait of the deceased. And not just any old
portrait but a lifelike picture that was quite different from traditional
stylised Egyptian images, instead echoing the realistic sculptural tradition the
Europeans were used to back home.
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The portraits look like oil on canvas, but almost all use a technique called
encaustic, where the artist applies pigmented wax to a wooden board with a small
spatula. Pioneering British Egyptologist William Flinders Petrie, who discovered
many of the portraits from 1888 onwards, was convinced they were painted from
life. He pointed out that they were all cut down to size to fit within the mummy
bandages, suggesting that they were originally hung at home. In one tomb he even
came across an entire framed portrait propped up beside a mummy.
Art historians agree with Petrie, noting how lifelike the pictures are and
how some of them show individuals who are younger than the mummies. But, more
than a century after they came to light, nobody had tested the accuracy of the
Fayum portraits—until now. A small team from the Unit of Art in Medicine
at Manchester University, working from skulls alone, has set out to recreate the
faces of four Fayum mummies in clay and compare these with their portraits.
Fewer than 10 per cent of Fayum portraits are still bound into mummies and
they are scattered across the globe, often held in private collections. But the
Manchester team was lucky enough to be provided with skulls from two mummies
held at the British Museum in London. One was a 50-year-old man, and the other
was a woman in her early twenties—AES74713. Armed only with this
information, Richard Neave, Caroline Wilkinson and Denise Smith set to work.
First they created copies of the skulls. Then, using techniques pioneered by
Neave, they began building up the facial muscles, gauging the depth of flesh by
the mummy’s sex and age at death, together with the ethnic origin, which is
apparent from the skull
(New Scientist, 27 February 1999, p 40).
After weeks of painstaking labour, two faces emerged. The man’s was broad and flat
with a hooked nose and square jaw. AES74713 had a small, narrow face, delicate
features, thick lips and a nose that curved slightly to the left. The moment of
truth came when the British Museum unveiled the two Fayum portraits. Both bore a
remarkable resemblance to their reconstructions. It looked as though Petrie had
been right all along.
But the team’s next two reconstructions showed it wasn’t quite that simple.
First came a 30-year-old man from the Glyptotek Museum in Copenhagen.
Wilkinson’s reconstruction produced a face with wide cheek bones, a broad,
straight nose, thick lips and a square jaw. It looked nothing like the portrait,
which was of a man with a long narrow face, long nose and rounded jaw. “The
skull showed black African characteristics and the portrait doesn’t show
any—it looks Caucasian,” says Wilkinson. What’s more, the age was all
wrong. “He was in his thirties at death, but the portrait actually looks older
than that.”
And when Wilkinson superimposed an image of the skull onto the portrait, she
found the proportions of the face didn’t match. Either the artist was
incompetent, or this was not the same man. The researchers suspect the latter.
“It’s possible that the portraits were mixed up at the time of mummification,”
says Wilkinson. “Especially at that period when lots of people were being
mummified.” Alternatively, she says, the switch could have been made
deliberately, much later, by European middlemen trying to maximise their profits
by combining a good portrait with an intact mummy.
The final face, from the Metropolitan Museum in New York, turned out to be
the most intriguing. Once again, the skull showed strong evidence of black
African ancestry. And Wilkinson’s reconstruction revealed a man with distinctly
African features—a wide nose, square jaw and thick lips. The face in the
portrait had fair skin, a narrow nose, and was younger—but the other
facial characteristics did seem to match. Unlike the previous face,
superimposing reconstruction and portrait convinced the researchers that this
was the same man. What was going on?
“It could be that it was more in fashion to be Greek in appearance,” says Bob
Brier from Long Island University in New York, an Egyptologist who worked with
the Manchester team. “There are quite a lot of Greco-Roman influences at that
time, in the clothing and the hairstyles,” agrees Wilkinson.
It’s an idea that fits with what we already know about the people of the
Fayum, says Susan Walker, a classicist at the British Museum, who supplied the
first two mummies for reconstruction. She points out that by the early 1st
century—when the Romans conquered Egypt—the Fayum Greeks had already
had three hundred years to intermarry with local Egyptians. But it was in their
interests to stress their European origins. “They were claiming a Greek ancestry
to try and up their status with the Romans,” says Walker. And it seems to have
worked. “They got special status,” she adds. “And they got 25 per cent off their
taxes. So that’s what these portraits celebrate.”
But adopting Greek and Roman fashions is one thing—trying to paint out
your mixed origins is quite another. It’s a contentious claim and Walker
cautions against reading too much into the observation that the Fayum portraits
seem to contain few black African faces. “You have to be terribly careful about
how you categorise ethnic origin in portraiture,” she says. Perhaps there’s a
simpler explanation for why the reconstruction of this fourth face fits so well
with its portrait, apart from the shape of the nose. It may be another instance
of mistaken identity. “It could be just chance that everything else matches,”
says Katherine Eremin from the National Museums of Scotland in Edinburgh.
Four mummies is not much of a sample upon which to judge an entire genre of
portraiture, but the researchers are convinced that, on the whole, the artists
aimed to represent their subjects as they appeared in real life. “One of the
things that’s reassuring is that they do look like the people inside,” says
Brier. But he accepts that there have been modifications. “Artists have always
flattered their sitters,” he says. “If someone doesn’t want to look so heavy,
he’s made a little thinner, if someone doesn’t want to look so African, maybe
he’s made a little more Caucasian.”
If the Fayum portraits are indeed windows into the past, then they may reveal
more than just the fashions and looks of people who lived 2000 years ago. In an
inspired piece of archaeological sleuthing, Otto Appenzeller, a neurologist from
the NMHEMC Research Foundation in Albuquerque, New Mexico, and his London-based
colleagues have been scrutinising the portraits for evidence of disease.
Many neurological diseases leave telltale signs on the face because damaged
nerves fail to hold muscles taut. Where an untrained observer might see droopy
eyes or a lopsided mouth, neurologists see the first clue that something is
amiss. Appenzeller has found that this same “spot diagnosis” also works on
portraits. So far, he has turned up evidence of five distinct abnormalities in
the collection of around 200 Fayum portraits held by the British Museum in
London.
Least serious, perhaps, are the cases of wall eye. Three individuals have
asymmetric glints in their eyes, a sign that the visual axes of the two eyes are
not parallel. This would have resulted in double vision. Then there’s the
middle-aged woman with oval pupils. Two things might cause that. “It’s either
due to diabetes or a condition called cortical basal degeneration,” says
Appenzeller. The latter condition, which is one cause of dementia, seems more
likely since a diabetic person would not have lived long without modern
treatments. Another woman showed signs—including sunken cheeks and
temples, down-turned mouth and wrinkled brow—of a form of muscular
dystrophy.
Appenzeller diagnosed acute Horner’s syndrome in a young man whose right eye
was severely bloodshot with a droopy lid and small pupil. He couldn’t have
survived more than two weeks. “My hypothesis was that [it] was due to a knife
being thrust into the boy’s eye,” he says. If correct, his skull would show
evidence of a fracture in the eye orbit. But this portrait had no body directly
associated with it, and in a search of more than 90 skulls from the same dig,
the researchers found none with the right sort of damage.
Without corroborating evidence from skulls, Appenzeller knows his diagnoses
cannot be definitive. But in one case the team was able to get that evidence.
This was one of two portraits where half the face appeared shrunken, signifying
a condition called progressive facial hemiatrophy where one side of the face
gradually wastes away. The portrait was one of the few with an associated skull,
and when the researchers examined this they found the thinned bone, asymmetry
and smooth interior surface that are characteristic of the disease. “It supports
the idea of the experts that mummy portraits are very accurate depictions of the
appearance of the individuals,” says Appenzeller. “When I look at them after two
millennia I can still see neurological disease.”
The eyes have it
-
Further reading:
Ancient Faces
edited by Susan Walker, British Museum Press (2000) -
Neurology in ancient faces
by Otto Appenzeller and others,
Journal of Neurology, Neurosurgery & Psychiatry, vol 70, p 524