Faces from 2,000 Years Ago

Why they matter

Greek and Roman painters were famous for portraits on wooden panels. Writers of the time praised them by name. Almost all of that painting is lost: wood rots, and panels burn. Egypt’s dry sand kept these. They are the largest group of painted portraits of real people to survive from the ancient world, and nearly all that is left of Greek and Roman panel painting.

“Realistic portraiture indeed has for many generations been the highest ambition of art.” Pliny the Elder, Rome, 1st century CE

Who they were

The people in these portraits lived in the towns of the Fayum, a basin of farmland west of the Nile, and in cities along the river such as Antinoopolis. Most were Egyptians, many with Greek names and a Greek education, in families that had mixed Egyptian and Greek ways for three centuries and now lived under Roman rule. They could afford a portrait: officials, soldiers, priests, and their wives and children. When the archaeologist Flinders Petrie dug the cemetery at Hawara, he found a portrait on only one or two mummies in a hundred.

Many of them are young. CT scans of mummies that still carry their portraits show that the age and sex in the painting match the body inside. Life was short, and these families lost children and young adults often.

Why they look so real

The painters worked in the Greek tradition, which prized a true likeness above all. They kept what a flattering painter would leave out: a mole on the nose, a thin face, a teenager’s first beard, a scar on an eyelid.

Women followed the hairstyles of the empresses in Rome, and those changed often, so a hairstyle dates a portrait to within a few decades. A woman with the plaited style of Trajan’s court was painted between 98 and 117 CE. Earrings changed with the fashion too.

How they were made

Most were painted in encaustic: pigment mixed into hot beeswax, laid on with brushes and worked with flat metal tools. Wax holds its color, which is why so many still look fresh. Others were painted in tempera, pigment bound with animal glue, which dries softer and chalkier. The panels are thin boards of imported wood, often linden or oak, and a few portraits are painted on linen. Gold leaf marks wreaths and jewelry.

Scientists studying the portraits have found Egyptian blue, the oldest man-made pigment, in at least 47 of them, in backgrounds and in the shadows of faces.

Painted in life, or at death

Both. Some panels were trimmed at the edges to fit the mummy’s wrappings, a sign they were painted earlier and kept at home. Others were painted at the time of death. In 2020, researchers rebuilt a small boy’s face from CT scans of his mummy and found it so close to his portrait that it was painted just before or just after he died.

How they were found

In 1615 the Italian traveler Pietro della Valle bought two portrait mummies near Saqqara; they are now in Dresden. In 1887, finders burned most of a group of about fifty as firewood before two were saved. In the 1890s the dealer Theodor Graf sold the portraits found at er-Rubayat across Europe and America. Flinders Petrie dug at Hawara from 1887 and found 81 portraits in his first season, and about 70 more when he returned in 1910. His notes are still the best record of where any of them were found.

Why they stopped

By the middle of the 3rd century the portraits end. The empire was in an economic crisis, religion in Egypt was changing, and from 212 CE every free person in the empire was a Roman citizen. The look did not disappear. The straight-on gaze, the large eyes and the wax on wood return in the first Christian icons, such as the 6th-century icons at Saint Catherine’s Monastery in Sinai.

Together in Rome

From November 5, 2026 to May 2, 2027, about 50 Fayum portraits hang together at the Ara Pacis Museum in Rome, in the exhibition Egypt and Rome: The Faces of Fayum. Portraits from Egypt’s own collections are lent abroad for the first time, beside 23 works from the Louvre.