£5m Egypt project is allowing Oxford's Ashmolean museum to display stunning
objects kept in storage for years
by Mark Brown for guardian.co.uk Wednesday
19 October 2011
Three beautifully restored mummy portraits of well-off young people who
were, 2,000 years ago, probably members of a mysterious group called "the
6475" are to go on display at the new home for one of the most important
Egyptian collections in the world.
The three faces - an enigmatic, beguiling young woman and two handsome men
- will go on permanent display at Oxford's Ashmolean museum next month
as part of the second phase of its redevelopment.
The £5m Egypt project is allowing the museum to display stunning objects
which have been in storage for years with twice as many mummies and coffins
being shown.
The oldest, on linen, is of a young woman dating from 55-70AD, excavated by
Flinders Petrie - the founding father of Egyptology in the UK - at the Roman
cemeteries of Hawara in Fayum, south-west of Cairo, in 1911.
Petrie had to do some immediate field conservation which involved him
heating up paraffin wax in a double boiler and pouring it over the portraits he
found.
It was a method that provokes only a slight shudder from Mark Norman, head
of conservation at the Ashmolean. "We may or may not agree with what he
did, but it worked," he said. "If he hadn't done it, we wouldn't have
the objects.
"We're not judgmental. We can condemn what our predecessors did but in
20 years somebody might be saying: 'what were those idiots at the Ashmolean
doing with that or this or the other.'"
That she looks so fresh and luminous is the result of work by the museum's
paintings conservator, Jevon Thistlewood, who also worked on the mummy
portraits of the two men, which date from around 100 years later.
They are extraordinarily moving portraits, said Susan Walker, the
Ashmolean's keeper of antiquities.
The detail in the woman, who would have been alive during the time of Nero,
is particularly striking. She has pale skin, certainly compared to the men, and
it signifies reasonably high birth. She was not someone who had to be out in
the sun working every day.
She has also been rouged and is wearing gold ball earrings of a sort that
are known from Pompeii, a gold necklace, a red hairband with pearls hanging
from it and a purple mantle around her shoulders. Walker also believes she is
wearing a skullcap.
"She is from a well-born family although they are not super rich,
these people. They are prosperous within their own communities."
It is thought the people in the portraits were the direct descendents of
the original settlers in the Fayum, who were Greek mercenary soldiers who
fought for the Ptolomies. They were given the land and adopted the Egyptian way
of life.
Their lineage mattered because when the Romans conquered Egypt they taxed
Egyptians much more harshly than Greeks in places such as Alexandria. The
people in Fayum managed to get a discount by arguing that they too were Greek.
The community in Fayum called themselves the 6475. "It must either be
the surviving number of descendants or, possibly, the number of people who were
settled there in the first place," Walker said.
All three deliberately present themselves in a very Roman way - the woman
has her jewellery and the men wear clavi, white tunics with red stripes.
There are still disputes over mummy portraits, for example whether they
were done while the subjects were alive or after they were dead, as part of the
70-day mummification process.
Walker, however, said the evidence suggests they were done at or shortly
before the time of death by artists associated with the cemeteries.
"Egyptologists are always very scathing about Roman mummification,
which is not what it had been in the Pharaonic period," said Walker.
"But they certainly tried to get it right."
The restoration is part of an enormous conservation project, one of the
biggest of its type in recent history. A year ago, staff at the Ashmolean
removed around 50,000 objects from the old displays, many of which were sent to
the museum's new conservation studios.
They joined items, such as the mummy portraits, from storage..
The new galleries are the second phase of the Ashmolean's redevelopment and
follow the dramatic internal overhaul of Britain's oldest museum by architect
Rick Mather. That was unveiled in 2009 and on 26 November the public will
finally see the all new Ancient Egypt and Nubia galleries, also redesigned by
Mather.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/oct/19/ancient-egyptian-mummy-portraits-ashmolean-museum
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