Funerary Portrait of a Young Girl

This funerary portrait was attached to the mummy of a young female elite from the Greco-Egyptian community in Roman Imperial Egypt. This young woman likely had her portrait painted upon her death near what is now Faiyum, Egypt.

So-called Fayum portraits combined Egyptian mummification and the Roman practice of funerary masks. They represented syncretic beliefs about death. Ancient Egyptians depicted the soul, the akh, as a being of light. They believed that the soul lived eternally when the body was preserved. To enable the person to eat and drink in the afterlife, they ceremonially "opened the mouths" of the recently dead while entombing them.

This young woman’s lips are gilded, or covered in a thin layer of gold, unusual for a Fayum portrait. The gilding may represent the opening of the mouth and the light of the eternal akh. Learn more about the use of gilding in Fayum portraits.

Transforming the spirit—not beautifying the mortal body—may have been the purpose of adding golden lips and jewelry to this painting. Egyptian-style burial customs and arts persisted throughout Greek, Roman, and Byzantine rule over Egypt (305 BCE–641 CE). The woman depicted in this panel lived between cultures. Her or her family’s choice of mummification reflected historical Egyptian practices of creating a physical “duplicate” for the deceased’s soul to rest in, and their decision to color her lips gold here may symbolize how death transformed her into an akh (effective spirit). In contrast, the choice of her clothing and hairstyle showed her embrace of contemporary ideals of Hellenic (Greco-Roman) Egyptian identity.