The Mysterious Fayum Portraits: Faces from Ancient Egypt

This acclaimed survey, now in an updated format with a new foreword by Ahdaf Soueif, offers a richly illustrated account of the history and discovery of astonishing funerary portraits from Greco-Roman Egypt. These remarkable paintings take their name from a district of Roman Egypt, whose inhabitants in the first three centuries CE included Greeks, Egyptians, Romans, Syrians, Libyans, Nubians, and Jews. In the Egyptian tradition, they embalmed the bodies of their dead; but then placed a painted portrait over the mummified person, preserving the memory of each individual. Over one thousand portraits have so far been discovered—men, women, and children of all ages. Including almost two hundred of these paintings, Euphrosyne Doxiadis's informative text combines incisive scholarship with a compelling selection of images of enduring freshness and beauty.

Doxiadis's text sets the people and the paintings in their social, artistic, and geographical context, describing the techniques used and showing how the Fayum portraits relate to Byzantine icon painting, in a tradition that extends from ancient Greece to the Renaissance and on to the present day.