The discovery of two complete mummy portraits and further incomplete portraits by Egyptian archaeologists working on their tenth season of excavations at Gerza, 75 miles southwest of modern-day Cairo, marks the first time in more than 115 years that such paintings have been seen in the open air. Additionally, the researchers discovered mummies, papyri, ceramics, and coffins that all date from the time Gerza was first settled as Philadelphia, in the Ptolemaic era (305–30 B.C.E.–30 B.C.E. ), to the Roman era (30 B.C.E.–390 C.E.
In order to ensure food supplies for his larger realm, King Ptolemy II (309-246 B.C.E.) founded Philadelphia as a bucolic central settlement, according to a statement from the Egyptian government. Since 2016, researchers have started excavating the multiethnic settlement that was previously home to both Greeks and Egyptians.
The mission’s most recent season investigated a semi-subterranean funerary house with a floor “made of colored lime mortar and decorated with interchangeable tiles,” according to Adel Okasha, head of Egypt’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities. The building has access to its own narrow street, and there’s a structure outside its southern facade where archaeologists discovered the remains of four columns. Six substantial mud-brick tombs with “mass burials in the catacomb style” are spread out over the interior of the funerary structure.
Mummies inside showed how much money mattered in ancient Gerza—some were embalmed with great care, while others were left for dead in “burials of a simple nature,” said Mostafa Waziri, secretary general of the Supreme Council of Antiq. Basem Gehad, the project’s head who oversaw the most recent dig, noted that his team also discovered “a number of coffins of different styles, some of them in the human form and others in the Greek form with a gab
Separate from the treasure was a terracotta statue of the fertility and love goddess Isis-Aphrodite that had been found inside the wooden coffin of a young Greek girl. Such a relic is not only uncommon, according to Gehad, but it also “reflects the influence of Greeks on Egyptian art as a result of [the] new community residing there.”
The new mummy pictures, on the other hand, are without a doubt the dig’s most significant find; they are the first to surface since 1911, when English archaeologist Flinders Petrie discovered 146 such portraits at a Roman cemetery.
These full-color portraits of the affluent dead, sometimes known as Fayoum portraits due to their abundance in the Fayoum Oasis, are among the most intricate ancient paintings that are now known. Gehad revealed to Artnet News that Theodor Graf, a Viennese art dealer, collector, and carpet manufacturer who served museums in both Europe and America as well as people like Sigmund Freud as a client, acquired the majority of the previously uncovered pictures.
This time, the Fayoum portraits will remain in Egypt for further study. “No one really knows the context of these portraits,” Gehad added. “Now, we can know certainly where they came from, and find more.”
