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Researchers unearth ancient clues in mummy portraits
By employing sophisticated scientific tools, a team of researchers has uncovered for the first time telling clues about the underlying surface shapes and colours of 15 mummy portraits created more than 2,000 years ago.
Washington: By employing sophisticated scientific tools, a team of researchers has uncovered for the first time telling clues about the underlying surface shapes and colours of 15 mummy portraits created more than 2,000 years ago.
The new details, when coupled together, provide the researchers with very strong evidence as to how these visages of the dead - considered to be antecedents of Western portraiture - were made. The well-preserved mummy portraits are extremely lifelike paintings of specific deceased individuals. Each portrait would have been incorporated into the mummy wrappings and placed directly over the person's face.
They were excavated more than 100 years ago at the site of Tebtunis (now Umm el-Breigat) in the Fayum region of Egypt. The set is now housed at the Phoebe A. Hearst Museum of Anthropology at University of California, Berkeley.
The researchers identified the pigments used by the artists and the order the paints were applied and to which regions, as well as sources of materials and the style of brushstrokes used.
