Dan Snow's History Hit - Life and Death in Greco-Roman Egypt

Episode Date: February 14, 2024

In its final centuries, Ancient Egypt was conquered by the Persians, the Greeks and the Romans, beginning with the invasion of Alexander the Great in 332 BC. But these new arrivals didn't squash the Egyptian way of life - the invaders blended their customs, practices and style with the native Egyptians. This is most notable in the extraordinary Fayum Mummy portraits - Egyptian sarcophagi with realistic Roman portraits painted on the front.To find out more about life and death in Greco-Roman Egypt, Dan visits the Manchester Museum to meet Dr Campbell Price, curator of Egypt and Sudan. Among the Fayum mummies in the museum's current exhibition 'Golden Mummies' they discuss the last years of Pharaonic Egypt.You can see the Fayum mummy portraits for yourself at the museum for free until mid-April 2024: Find out more hereProduced by Mariana Des Forges, edited by Dougal PatmoreDon’t miss out on the best offer in history! Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for £1 for 3 months with code DANSNOW sign up now for your 14-day free trial https://historyhit/subscription/.We'd love to hear from you! You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi everybody, welcome to Dan Snow's History Hit. I've seen them in a few different places. I've seen them in the Cairo Museum. I've seen one in the Sainsbury Centre, the Art Museum in Norwich, Norfolk in the east of England. And I've seen some beautiful examples in the Manchester Museum in the north of England. They are sarcophagi. They're coffins in which Egyptians were buried. But they look very different to the ones that you might be thinking of.

Giant, carved stone, idealised portraits, or even the beautiful golden death mask of Tutankhamen. These sarcophagi have extraordinary, realistic paintings of people's faces on wooden panels. They are, I think, the most beautiful, the most lifelike, realistic depictions of the human form that I've ever seen from any centuries BC. And they're a product of Egypt, but not the Egypt of the pharaohs, the Egypt of the Ptolemies, the Greeks, and the Romans. By 31 BC, when Egypt became part of the Roman Empire, these so-called mummy portraits were the new trend for burials. The paintings that you see on these wooden panels show a great variety of people. There is light and dark skin, there's curly hair and straight, black, brown and blonde.

The ones in the Manchester Natural History Museum are Romans, but they're engaging in the ancient Egyptian practice of mummification, following the ancient Egyptian burial practices. These paintings, these mummies, demand that you ask questions of them. They give us an extraordinary window into the Greco-Roman era of Egypt, the point at which it sort of stops being ancient Egypt and, well, turns into something else, where the art, the traditions, and the cultures are a fusion of three mighty civilizations, Greeks, the Romans, and the Egyptians. And these portraits show that Egypt is going through a period of

transition from old to new. That period probably begins with the conquest of Alexander the Great in 332 BC. After Alexander, who really took to ancient Egypt, you get the rule of the Ptolemies, one of Alexander the Great's generals, who seized Egypt and he and his descendants ruled for centuries. Alexandria became a centre of Greek culture and learning. Egypt then became Roman with the death of the famous Cleopatra and the Roman conquest around 30 BC. And Rome changed the Egyptian economy and its administration and culture. the Egyptian economy and its administration and culture. But Romans, like the Greeks before them,

seem to show a degree of respect for Egyptian religion and customs, which must have eased that transition to a new era. In fact, more than just respect, it seems that the Romans became Egyptianophiles. They wanted to live and die as the ancient Egyptians had done. And it's from that cultural exchange that we get these incredible so-called Fayum mummy portraits. To find out more about life and death in Egypt under Greek and Roman rule, I went to the Manchester Museum to meet Dr. Campbell Price.

He's been on this podcast many times, great friend, and he's curator of their Egypt and Sudan collection, where right now you can see these incredible painted mummies and other extraordinary artifacts that tell the story of greek roman egypt in their golden mummies exhibition which has proved a smash hit and is running till mid-april 2024 so get there as soon as you can we've gone through 30 centuries of ancient egypt this week i hope you've enjoyed it and we're now at the final years the last gasp of pharaonic egypt it's transitioned into a Roman province and it's the end of ancient Egyptian civilization as we often define it. It would be a long time and several more conquests before Egypt held its own fate in its hands. Here's Dr. Campbell Price. Enjoy.

Campbell, describe where we are at the moment because it feels archetypally museumy. It is very museumy, Dan, because we're right in the bowels of Manchester Museum. We're on the ground floor, we're in the museum stores. We're surrounded by archaeology, local archaeology and Egyptian archaeology, Egyptian and Sudanese archaeology. So everything you see around you in these boxes, for the most part, is over 2,000 years old. It's wonderful. There's brown, red, orange boxes piled high. There's a reconstructed Roman shield up there with its famous big boss that they used to whack into people. So that's good fun as well. And there's obviously big, huge drawers, filing cabinets for big documents and manuscripts as well.

It's a wonderful space. But we hear today talk about ancient Egypt, but it's not the bit of ancient Egypt that people will be thinking of, perhaps. New kingdoms, Ramesses, Tutankhamen, pyramids, even Old Kingdom. There's a whole bit, isn't there? Tell me about Ptolemaic Egypt. What is that? Well, in a way, this is the bridge to modernity because you've got pharaonic times. And when I

studied Egyptology at university, Ramesses II died and everything else was decline. But then how did you get to Cleopatra? So Cleopatra VII is a key figure. She dies in 30 BC, and she is the last in a line of kings called Ptolemy, who are successors of Alexander the Great. So he sweeps in in the fourth century BC, and he's a liberator. he's an invader, take your pick, and he is accepted as a living god in Egypt, and then he goes on battling elsewhere in the world. But he kind of got quite into Egypt while he was there, didn't he? He liked being a living god. He did.

Like a lot of non-Egyptian rulers, they liked the kind of trappings of kingship, of being pharaoh, and so, yes, he's accepted as the kind of trappings of kingship of being pharaoh and so yes he's accepted as the son of amun and he is interested in that and he goes and probably uses that as an ego boost but he leaves a friend the general ptolemy in charge and so ptolemy kicks off a new dynasty which lasts 300 years and that ends in cleopatra VII. And with the death of Cleopatra VII in the aftermath of the Battle of Actium, Egypt becomes part of the Roman world. So it becomes absorbed into the Roman Empire. So that last three centuries leading up to Cleopatra

is a time of, I mean, Egypt was always in contact with other parts of the world. It was always multicultural. But the family of Alexandria is obviously from Macedon. So they're Greek, they're ethnically Greek. And so the Ptolemies set up a new capital city on the northern coast, looking out to the Mediterranean, called Alexandria, surprise, surprise, named after Alexander. And they try very hard to strike a balance between being Greek and probably speaking Greek to each other and being Egyptian and being the pharaoh and keeping the priests happy so Cleopatra VII is the last of these Ptolemaic rulers and she's really the last pharaoh because after her Egypt is ruled by Roman emperors and you mentioned keeping the priests happy. Do you get this kind of

hybrid culture? Do they go native or do they import lots of their Greek ideas and architecture and values? What's the result of this? Based on what survives, because obviously you can only judge what survives, you have got absolutely a hybrid culture, a hybrid elite culture, because a lot of people, the farmers in the fields, we don't know what they think or do or believe. But the rich people, the elites, the royals, they are people who see themselves as, I think, a mixture of, yeah, Greek. So Greek is used in documents. So if you're writing an official document, you write it in Greek. If you write a religious document in an Egyptian temple, that has to be in hieroglyphs. So knowledge of hieroglyphs

is still current in Ptolemaic Egypt. And Alexandria gets this extraordinary reputation for geography, for engineers, for arts. Is it just that nature of having a kind of dynamic, creative, febrile city full of different cultures rubbing up against each other? What's happening there? Yeah, I think it's dynamic. It's cosmopolitan. People are still crying about the loss of the Library of Alexandria. I've never got over it.

Yeah, the later destruction of the Library of Alexandria is still regarded as one of the greatest losses of cultural and intellectual material of all time. So, yeah, there must be something going on there. Yeah, yeah. I mean, you have people coming from the whole Eastern Mediterranean and further because Egypt was always this kind of in-between point. It's a land bridge between Africa, the continent of Africa,

and what we now call the Middle East. And it had this incredibly ancient, hallowed, venerated culture that the Greeks absolutely were drawn to like a magnet. So what was in the Library of Alexandria, goodness knows, there were plenty of documents that we know of referred to in Egypt that could go down back to the time of the pyramids, but which are lost. A reminder that what we have of the ancient world is just such a tiny little sliver. And you can imagine what was there in that library. Oh, it's painful. Missing books of Tastos, for example. Anyway, so the Greeks build this amazing hybrid dynamic culture. How did the Romans deal with Egypt and Egyptian-ness? They have a kind of a mixed attitude. On one hand, like the Greeks, they're very reverential. But then, you know, when someone like Octavian, who becomes the Emperor Augustus, shows up in Egypt, he's shown the entombed body of Alexander and the Egyptian priests offer to show him the Apis Bull, the sacred Apis bull, this incarnation of an Egyptian god. And

Augustus says, well, I'm accustomed to worshipping gods, not cattle. So on one hand, the Romans are respectful. They show themselves, the emperors, as Egyptian pharaohs on Egyptian temple walls. But culturally, they don't spend much time there because they're ruling the empire. People like Hadrian are Egyptophiles. When his boyfriend, friend, lover, Antinous, drowns, Hadrian declares he's an Egyptian god, and he's the last Egyptian god. And Hadrian and others ship lots of obelisks to Rome. So there are more standing obelisks in Rome today than there are in Egypt. And the beautiful columns on the front of the pantheon are from an aquarian Egypt,

which I once went to. It's a very exciting trip across the desert. So let's just quickly deal with the Roman, because actually Egypt plays a key part in this, in the end of the Roman Republic and the birth of empire. You mentioned Augustus Octavian was in Egypt. Cleopatra, you've mentioned, people know her. Mark Antony, favourite of Julius Caesar. He's given that sort of half of the empire, isn't he, given the east in an uneasy agreement with Octavian. They all fall out. Does he get too into being Egyptian, do you think? Does he sort of betray his Roman roots? That's part of the friction between him and Octavian. Yes, because I think he gets associated with Cleopatra, and Cleopatra is seen by the Romans as a very scary, threatening Eastern woman. And that is the attitude that has influenced everyone up to Shakespeare,

who's drawing on classical sources, whereas sources in Arabic emphasise that she was a scholar, a politician, a diplomat, not what Western sources emphasize so octavian invades egypt and cleopatra and antony famously flee and then they fight the battle of actium they lose the naval battle which is the last of these roman civil war battles octavian now augustus consolidates the whole of of the mediterranean basin the whole of the roman empire and that's that does life change with its incorporation into the roman empire is it a different feel to how it was when it was a the Mediterranean basin, the whole of the Roman Empire, and that's that. Does life change with its incorporation into the Roman Empire? Is it a different feel to how it was when it was a

Ptolemaic Greek kingdom? I think like anything in history, you know, what makes a new chapter in our history books when you're experiencing it, it's not, you know, new poetry, new language. If you're paying taxes, maybe the kind of regulations are changing, but day-to-day life doesn't change very much Egyptian religion persists slowly absorbing as it always had done outside deities so there are Greek and Roman gods who are absorbed into the Egyptian pantheon and then Egyptian deities like Isis the goddess Isis was worshipped not far probably from where we're sat now in Manchester, in Roman Manchester. So the cult of Roman and Greek deities is very much accepted as part of Egyptian religion. And then certain Egyptian deities become popular in the Roman world.

deities become popular in the Roman world. And certainly in Egypt, when people die, that is a really interesting hybridity where there's a definite favouring of pharaonic gods and symbols and images over classical ones. And are the Romans insisting that everyone speaks Latin? No, I don't think Latin has much hold in Egypt. For certain official No, I don't think Latin has much hold in Egypt. For certain official contemporary inscriptions, secular inscriptions, you'd use Latin. The documentary language is Greek still, so that's being inherited from the Ptolemies.

And anything in a pharaonic context, so a temple or a tomb, would still be written in hieroglyphs. Well, on that note, should we go and look at this amazing gallery? Let's do that, Dan. Let's do that. You're listening to Dan Snow's History here. There's more to come. I'm Matt Lewis.

And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings, Normans, Kings and Popes,

who were rarely the best of friends, murder, rebellions, and crusades. Find out who we really were by subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit wherever you get your podcasts oh cameron it's a great exhibition isn't it it's dark with wonderful lighting and you can already see the beautiful colors of objects here fantastic describe what we're all seeing here now so this is

the exhibition golden mummies of egypt it was a pleasure to curate because, as you said, things are much better lit in a special exhibition. They're never usually lit so well in a permanent gallery. So this is 108 objects from Greco-Roman Egypt, mostly from the excavations of Flinders Petrie at the site of Hawara. Petrie was a famous Egyptologist. Howard Carter would have been a senior figure at the time and he lived at the end of the Victorian period as well. So Petrie famously said of Carter who trained with him, oh, I can't work him up as an archaeologist.

And then Carter became the most famous archaeologist ever. So the story is basically about expectations of the afterlife in the Greco-Roman period. So 300 BC right the way through to maybe 200 AD. I love the way it says up on the wall there, Egypt in the Greco-Roman period. I mean, that's three of the great cultures of the ancient East Mediterranean, ancient Near East. And yet we're talking about them all sort of laying on top of each other here. It's fascinating. Yeah. I mean, what you're going to see is a lot of hybrid ideas about divinity and about what happens when you die. And there's always space for the other two. They seem to coexist

quite happily. So that's why we talk about a multicultural society. Which in human terms is, well, I don't know if it's unlikely, but more recently in our history, we tend to think of slightly more dogmatic religious practices, don't we? So it's odd that these can knock along together alongside each other without being threatened by each other. Without being threatened. But you'll see as we go around, there are different contexts where it's more appropriate to emphasize one culture maybe over the other. So the material we're next to now, these terracotta figurines are from houses. Next to now, these terracotta figurines are from houses. So these are from domestic contexts.

And you'll notice there is more of a classical bent to these. So there are goddesses influenced by classical tradition of Aphrodite, Demeter, the god Harpocrates, who is shown as a kind of cherubic child with a Roman toga on. But on top of his head, he's wearing an Egyptian crown. So that's typical of Horus the Child, but in classical contexts, he's the kind of innocent child who defends you from negative forces. It's fascinating, isn't it? Because you're looking at Egyptian figures,

but sculpted in the classical Greek tradition. Yes. I mean, this is my favourite in front of us. This in the classical Greek tradition. Yes I mean this is my favourite in front of us this is the god Bess so in pharaonic times you know Tutankhamen's tomb has images of Bess and he's running at you with his tongue out and feathers in his hair and knives in his hands so he's defending you from negative forces. Come the Ptolemaic period the most threatening thing they can think of is a Ptolemaic Macedonian soldier. So that's why he's wearing Macedonian armor with quite a distinctive shield and a sword that you wouldn't get in pharaonic times. So he is the idea of negative forces turned against themselves.

Great. But I thought the Ptolemies were Macedonian. They were, yeah. So they're using the image of the external threat. This was found in Egypt, of course, in an Egyptian household. Fascinating. Let's keep going. We have eight mummified people in the space, and this gentleman is one of them, the first we're going to encounter. Quite unusually for these Roman period, probably second century mummified bodies, his name is given in Greek. So you see on his chest. So his name is given in greek so you see on his chest so his name is

artem adoris he is this encapsulation of a multicultural expectation for death so his name is in greek he's shown as a high class roman citizen you we should say he's shown because people may be familiar with this it's some of the most amazing art i think from the whole of the ancient world they're painted portraits where the head of the mummy would be on the outside of the casket and painted realistically I mean that's a portrait that we would recognize as painted today yes we're going to see more of these around the corner because Manchester is one of the the best collections of these outside Cairo the question of what they represent and how they represented it I'll come back to here, that's giving you a Roman identity.

So he's got the laurel leaves you see picked out in gold. He's got a toga by the looks of it. Yeah, he's got a Roman-style toga, and he's shown as an elite Roman man. But then the rest of the cover is details of pharaonic gods. You've got the god Osiris there with his tall crown, the falcon god horus the goddess isis perhaps with her wings outstretched the god anubis the jackal god all of these are being invoked to give him what i would say is the punchline of the exhibition which is divinity

after death so the people are becoming gods not just mingling with gods. So you think this is a democratisation of becoming a god? They're all becoming gods now? Oh, I don't know if it's democratisation as such. This guy's pretty well off still. But interestingly, in cases where these Roman period mummies, so second century AD mummies, have been analysed, that red pigment has been shown to be from the Rio Tinto in Spain. So that was one aspect of imperial culture that you could import things

which in pharaonic times you would not have had access to. And beneath that portrait stretching down the length of the body, the length of this plaster cover in the shape of a mummy, it's red and there are depictions in gold of ancient Egyptian deities where are we going now so we're going to go around and look at a few more faces so these are the kind of trappings

that you would have in the Ptolemaic period into the Roman period as well and often it's quite difficult to date them for sure because they don't have king's names on, you can't really do it precisely, but this is part of this huge industry, albeit for elite people, of funerary arts. And that's what Petrie and other archaeologists were finding at sites like Hawara. There were lots, I mean, there were thousands of bodies. Maybe only 2% or 3% of them had nice decoration. So you must have been fairly well off to be mummified because it's a very labor intensive, material rich process.

But to have painted, cartonised this material that's like paper mache, you know, you had to be fairly well off to commission the skills to do these things. So you think these people are buying themselves not just the place in the afterlife but in the top tier of the afterlife? Absolutely and we have this idea fairly consistently throughout pharaonic times that you are going to not just be in the company of the gods but you are going to be a god yourself. So a lot of visitors are coming in here and seeing lots of faces it's an exhibition about faces and they say oh that looks like uncle joe or that looks like the lady i saw on the street none of these look like living people none of them represent people as we would represent them in a western representational mimetic style a way of showing someone as they actually are they are meant to beized. They're meant to be perfect like gods.

And if you can afford it, as you'll see around the corner, you would use lots of gold. And there's a much more liberal use of gold in the Greco-Roman period than in the earlier pharaonic times. So you say they're not meant to look like people. They're not meant to look like the individuals themselves. They do, however, they are incredibly real. Mimetic is a new word that I've learned from you

that I enjoy very much. So they are very mimetic. So this is almost, I hate doing this. It's a kind of Instagram filter-y, you know, quick cleanse on the portraits. Yes, I think that you can look at it that way. So here, the lady whose mask we're looking at in this case, in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, there's a case that has a dozen exactly the same masks.

People didn't look exactly the same. There weren't 12 people walking around looking exactly the same. This was a product of the funerary industry, sure. But gods, and this is something we've tried to emphasise in this exhibition, don't have things that you might improve with an Instagram filter. They don't have gammy legs. They don't have arthritis. They don't have gammy legs. They don't have arthritis. They don't have tumours.

The sort of thing that biomedical interpretation tends to foreground. So that's why we don't put CT scans or x-rays in because gods are without human frailties and the point of being mummified is to be perfect

and not to dwell on ailments. And all of these five in front of us now, they were real people. they'd be very beautiful, they'd be perfect. Yes, symmetrical and algorithmic study of images has shown how mathematically perfect they are. So we've just come around the corner now and I'm afraid we have got golden mummies here, folks.

We've got actual golden mummies. But again, looking at this, it is this really strange hybrid of a kind of egyptian mummy style that we're all so familiar but there are strong greek and and roman influences here aren't there yeah so what you're seeing is the mummified body of a lady called isaius daughter of demetrios so her name is given on greek at the top of the mask but then yes she's shown as an elite Roman lady she again probably dates to the late first maybe early second century AD she's got this kind of Liz Taylor style jewelry on from the 1960s Cleopatra film probably the only thing that that film actually

got right got accurate in terms of the costuming but you can see the rest so the upper part is made of plaster and is covered in gold gold leaf but then the rest of the body is covered in a shroud and this is one of the best preserved shrouds from this period it's quite colorful you can see there are pharaonic gods there are jackal gods there's um goddess isis again and there's a wonderful fiction there because there's a scene of the jackal god anubis tending the mummy on a bed a lion-headed bed just like the ones found in tootin cummins tomb underneath there are four jars the canopic jars that is a complete fiction there were no canopic jars in the roman period so it's what is appropriate to show in this multicultural mash-up that will get you into the afterlife and turn you into a god. And a canopic jar is where your sort

of entrails go, right? Your key organs. Yes, in the Pharaonic period that's where the some of the internal organs are removed and stored. But the Romans decided to cut that bit out. Literally, yes. So where the CT scans have been done, you can see for the most part, they still have their organs intact. And why do we think that is? How did the process of making mummies change in this, through these centuries? I mean, the process of mummification had constantly been in flux and constantly been changing depending on the time period in the region in Egypt you were in. And that continues into Roman times.

It's not just that in Roman times the practice declined. That's quite common still in Egyptology. You talk about the decline of mummification standards. These people still believed they were doing a good job. They were successfully, it was hoped, transforming the body of a dead person into the image of a god. transforming the body of a dead person into the image of a god and so that's why i talk more in the exhibition about this is not mummification in the service of preservation it's mummification to transform the degradable decomposable body into something eternal and divine let's turn around here we've got some sound effects here. We've got another beautiful golden one here. Same thing, a golden head, shoulders and upper body,

and then the rest of the body wrapped in a shroud. Yes. So what you're seeing, all of these mummies and masks are from the site of Hawara, where Petrie worked for three seasons. So what you're seeing is material that was excavated by Egyptian workers, who are largely nameless in the record but we know of course petrie um and he and his team uncovered these and so can you see the eyes of this lady are inlaid and if you look very closely you can see she's got bronze eyelashes so some

experimental archaeology has been done to recreate the conditions of viewing in the second century AD. So not like where we are now in a museum with electric light, but if you hold a candle or a kind of puttering flame up, our eyes look like they're alive. So that's emphasizing this sense of divinity and otherworldliness, which is important for these Roman mummies because we've got good evidence that their feet are often damaged because they've been stood up. So they were encountered for some time, so years after their deaths, in a kind of chapel situation

where the family would go and visit them and only later would they be gathered together and buried so you would go and visit your relatives in this mummified form that is astonishing i guess that speaks to the the loss the desire to maintain a relationship somehow with those with those departed guess, yes. So if you follow this through to its, well, to an ancient Egyptian logical conclusion, we've got lots of texts that talk about the gods having bones of iron and flesh of gold. So they have skin that is untarnishable,

won't rust, perfect for an immortal being. If you can afford it, you use gold to emphasize that you've made that transition into the divine state that you're going to live forever in this perfect state because remember these are mold made masks they're not a death mask modeled on the features of a an individual so remember that these mummified bodies we're seeing first second century a.d are contemporary with the masks and the portraits next door. Okay now here we are we've just come around the corner we've got another mummy here with what I thought was a very realistic

portrait but you're telling me is a sort of idealized representation of a person but super realistic. Yes I mean these are things which visitors to the, some of them find shocking because this suddenly can crash as in with a Western sense of art and the human image, because these faces have got the flash of light in the eyes. They look like people you would see in the street. And so I'm deeply sceptical myself that they represent the people on whose bodies they now rest. In fact, there's even a school of thought that they were painted in Italy and shipped into Egypt. So they're not being done, as Flinders Petrie, the archaeologist, thought, from a sitting. You know, you're not sitting in your prime because you want a portrait and hanging it on your wall, as he thought. There are lots of portraits of children so why would they be showing children in their prime if they hadn't yet achieved it

we are just seduced by these faces because you know it's a human reaction you see a human face and you're attracted to it but we kid ourselves on often that these are you you know, Polaroids. They're not photographs. They're filtered through a whole series of layers of decorum, what is appropriate to show. And for the most part, they look like the Roman emperor. That's how you date them. Is by hairstyle. Is it the second style of Commodus or the third style of Hadrian? Because remember, the Roman emperor was a god, was a living god.

And so this is just a different way of visualising divinity. You can choose a gold mask, or you can choose one of these panel portraits. The interesting thing to me is someone has to make a choice. The dead don't bury themselves. The family must choose, oh, grandpa Artemidorus, he'll have a mask. Or grandpa grandpa someone else gets a portrait and just to emphasize again these portraits look almost contemporary i mean they are nearly 2 000 years old and why is that is that because they've been in undergrad they've been in these incredibly dry conditions why do these look more human than something painted on a wall in Pompeii or pottery or any other image that we have from that period. I think you're right that the style, the concept of depicting a person like

this comes from Rome. So it comes from those Pompeian images. This is not necessarily indigenous to pharaonic Egypt, but they're being used as masks. And the problem is, of course, in English, you talk about a mask as something that's brought through seeing your face. These are called portraits. They're meant to reveal your face. These are the same object. They're giving you a divine face. And even though we like to imagine that people looked like this, I don't think they did. Would these have been hanging on the walls of Roman houses? Petrie thought that they had a purpose during the life of an individual.

I'm suspicious of that. I think they're posthumous. They're painted on very thin lime wood. Lime trees are not indigenous to Egypt. So even the material, at least, is imported. They're painted quickly using an encaustic technique. So they're pigment mixed with hot wax so technically they are incredibly accomplished to produce images like this very fast you know

it's impressive but they've survived because they were buried in sand and left alone just not in tombs not in catacombs not in vaults under under the ground, covered in a sheet, a Hessian sack from Petrie's accounts when he excavates Hawara, and they're left alone for almost 2,000 years. And the hot Egyptian desert sand has preserved them. Because they are flimsy. So if these were being done on Roman street corners for tourists, they wouldn't have lasted two seconds, right? It's just something so special about where they were preserved and how they were buried under that sand. And when Petrie found them, they weren't arranged as they are here, as if in an art gallery. And of course, that conditions how people see them and interpret them. They were all attached to bodies. And Petrie makes no bones about the fact that he throws away the body often and keeps

the skull and keeps the portrait if it survives, because he anticipates something that we would call facial reconstruction. But then Petrie had ideas about race and about eugenics. He was an active eugenicist. So there's a sinister subtext there. They're obviously displayed differently now, but how long have they been in the collection? They've been here since they were excavated in the 1880s. So 130d years.

Have they always been as popular and engaging as they are now? Are people just hypnotised by them? I think as soon as they came out of the ground, the archaeologist Flinders Petrie was absolutely rapt by them. He put them on temporary display in London at the Egyptian Hall in Piccadilly in 1888, and there's good circumstantial evidence that that show was seen by Oscar

Wilde. So, yeah, Picture of Dorian Gray is absolutely based on one of these handsome young chaps in the portraits. Wow. And actually he was more right than he knew because these are immortal. Well, that's the thing. You know, they have the wizened, mummified body

that's 2,000 years old. They are often still wrapped up. But the portrait's never aged a day since 200 AD. So that's something to dwell upon. Thank you so much for showing me around this exhibition. Get yourself down to Manchester Museum, folks. I really hope you've enjoyed this series on ancient Egypt. Go ahead and hit follow in your podcast app.

Get more series and episodes like this automatically onto your phone. And if you want even more Egypt, we have a bonus episode out tomorrow for our subscribers on Nefertiti, the most beautiful and perhaps the most powerful of Egyptian queens. See the link in the show notes to sign up.