A Mixed Society

The portraits reveal a world where cultures blended. A single person might carry a Greek name, wear Roman fashions, and receive a traditional Egyptian burial. The faces sit at this crossroads — painted in a Greek style, dressed in the look of the empire, and bound into a mummy in the age-old Egyptian way.

A handful of mummies have been CT-scanned and had their faces reconstructed from the skull, with mixed results. In one well-known case, a blind reconstruction of a Roman-era child closely matched the portrait's overall proportions — though the painted nose and mouth were narrower than the bone structure suggested. In another, the skull's proportions pointed to a different person than the face on the panel. What the scans more reliably confirm is that the age and sex of the body usually line up with the painted portrait, even if exact likeness is harder to prove.