Made of inscribed papyri

[Mummy mask]. A woman's mummy mask made of inscribed papyri with a winged scarab.

€ 75,000.00

Expressive mummy mask made of inscribed papyri, worked to a cartonnage and covered with a layer of plaster and painted polychrome. Mummy masks were commonly made of stucco, plaster or cloth, silver or gold for rulers, or even wood or clay. Those based on cartonnage from discarded papyrus, as here, sometimes preserve legible text, and such fragments have proved an important source for historical research, including biblical studies.

The mask is almost certainly female, as indicated by the light-coloured face (a convention in ancient Egyptian art where women's skin was typically shown as pale or yellowish, in contrast to the reddish-brown hues used for men), the vulture-winged headdress (a protective symbol of motherhood associated with female deities like Mut or Isis, and commonly worn by queens and high-status women), and the absence of a stylized beard. The face is rounded and softly contoured, with high eyebrows, large almond-shaped eyes, and a relatively small mouth - conventional indicators of femininity in ancient Egyptian funerary art. Further, the vertical bands of painted beadwork patterns on the chest are more commonly seen on female masks and coffins, imitating the elaborate beaded dresses worn by elite women in funerary contexts.

The mask is shown wearing a tripartite wig and a golden-yellow fillet, bound at the back with a red thread. In the centre of the fillet is a golden sun disk framed in red. Above is a finely painted winged scarab with a blue body and golden-yellow wings with blue stripes. The blue lobes of the wig cascade over the shoulders in the front and finish in horizontal red, golden yellow and blue stripes.

On the inside, remains of inscribed papyri are clearly recognizable. The legible inscription on the inside of the back of the mask is a settlement in Demotic Egyptian. It mentions month dates, specifically the third month of the Peret period (season of the emergence) as well as the first three months of the Shemu period (season of the harvest), and amounts of money in copper standard. The inscription dates the mask quite precisely to the late 2nd to early 1st century BCE.

Mounted.