Their faces draw you in — big, expressive eyes staring out as if they’ve been frozen in the act of remembering something important. Painted on wooden panels and placed over the faces of mummified bodies in Fayum in Greco-Roman Egypt, the paintings were meant to guide their subjects into the afterlife while preserving their identities here on earth.
Discovered thousands of years later in the 19th century, the portraits have sparked debates about who made them, who they were for, and what they say about the era of cultural exchange and blended traditions. Even now, they are shrouded by questions. What do these lifelike faces reveal about identity and status? How do they fit into the larger picture of art history? The Mysterious Fayum Portraits: Faces from Ancient Egypt leans into this enigma, offering a fresh opportunity to reflect on how much we know — and don’t know — about these extraordinary works.
The book, a reissue of a publication by author and artist Euphrosyne Doxiadis first released 30 years ago, offers an opportunity to reexamine and recontextualize these remarkable works through a modern lens. Egyptian writer Ahdaf Soueif’s new foreword challenges readers to think beyond the confines of art-historical silos, asking whether it’s more important to categorize art or to contextualize it. By situating the Fayum portraits at the intersection of Egyptian, Greek, Roman, Syrian, and Jewish traditions, the book opens up space to understand how cultural practices evolve and intermingle. This approach echoes broader efforts to deconstruct and expand the traditional art-historical canon, reminding us that the act of categorization is, in and of itself, a deeply Western impulse.
The portraits are visually arresting, both timeless and personal — akin to the connection you’d feel looking at a cherished family photograph or the carefully posed image on the program of a Baptist funeral service. Take the portrait of Aline, also called Ténos, painted around 69–117 CE directly onto the linen shroud wrapped around her body. Found alongside two others presumed to be her daughters, Aline’s portrait captures a striking immediacy, her gaze meeting yours with a quiet but undeniable strength. It’s intimate in a way that suggests it may have been painted from life — a preservation not just of her image but of her humanity, of her role as a mother and a person made eternal.
But their beauty has also been a source of contention. As Doxiadis explains, early scholars were hesitant to accept that such technically advanced works could have been created during the Greco-Roman period in Egypt, speaking volumes about the biases embedded in our understanding of art history and the limits of linear narratives of artistic progression.
Though there are several essays throughout The Mysterious Fayum Portraits, the emphasis is on the imagery: large, full-color reproductions that allow readers to immerse themselves in the craftsmanship of the portraits. The book is organized into three main sections, beginning with an exploration of the cultural, social, and religious context of Greco-Roman Egypt and moving on to the portraits themselves, providing detailed commentary on their iconography and techniques. The final section examines the find sites, delving into the provenance of these works and their journey into the modern art world.
The book doesn’t explicitly delve into the intricacies of looting or illicit trading, though it does include a section dedicated to Fayum portraits whose provenance is unknown, leaving room to consider the larger questions about the European archaeological excavations of the paintings. A Fayum portrait housed at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, though not mentioned in the book, was seized by the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office in 2022 as part of an investigation into allegedly looted antiquities. The high-profile case highlights the murky histories tied to ancient artifacts and their journeys into museum collections, underscoring the ongoing importance of transparency and accountability and adding weight to the broader questions the book gestures toward, despite not explicitly addressing them.
This book particularly resonates with me as an artist involved in Flight into Egypt: Black Artists and Ancient Egypt, 1876–Now, an exhibition at The Met that explores how Black artists have engaged with and reimagined Ancient Egyptian art, history, and symbolism over the past 150 years. While my work often engages with Ancient Egyptian signifiers like the Nefertiti bust, I approach these themes more conceptually, considering their meanings in a broader global and historical context. This book, in contrast, offers a focused study of a specific artistic tradition and its intersections with other cultures.
The preserved richness of the colors — the ochres, deep reds, and golds — feel almost magical, a testament to the dry climate that safeguarded these works for centuries. Each portrait, while following a shared aesthetic tradition, reveals something unique about the artist’s hand, the individuality of the subject, and the cultural moment of its inception. Take, for example, the portrait of a man from the late Flavian-Trajanic period (81–117 CE). Compared to Aline’s delicate, linear brushstrokes and the softness in her gaze, this portrait is bold, almost commanding. Painted with Punic wax applied cold with brushes and mixed with oil or egg, it has a textured, layered quality that makes the man’s face sculptural, as if he could step out of the panel.
What connects my practice to these works, though, isn’t the style or the techniques — it’s the idea of cultural production as a discussion. These portraits are part of a larger dialogue, one that spans time and space, showing how traditions evolve and adapt through the hands and ideas of the artists who engage with them.
The book feels aligned with what Flight into Egypt aims to do: acknowledge how Egyptian artistic practices have inspired people all over the world, while asking how artists can engage them thoughtfully — reverently, even — instead of exploitatively. Both the book and the exhibition push us to consider what it means to take cultural symbols and make them your own. Who has the right to do that? Under what circumstances? And what happens when those symbols have been stripped away or reimagined by people who have been denied access to their own histories? In the case of Flight into Egypt, it’s about how Black artists, often working in systems where their voices have been erased or minimized, reclaim ancient Egyptian imagery as a way of building connections to a broader African past.
At the same time, both the book and the exhibition force us to confront the tensions between honoring shared histories and dealing with erasure. It’s not just about celebrating the ways cultures mix and overlap — it’s about recognizing the people and communities who get sidelined in the process. Whether it’s Black artists in contemporary contexts or Ancient Egyptian artisans overshadowed by Greco-Roman influences, there’s always a question of who gets remembered and who gets left out.
Ultimately, what makes the Fayum portraits so captivating is their ability to disrupt our understanding of art history. They challenge assumptions about technical progression in Egypt and open up possibilities for similarly overlooked innovations elsewhere. This disruption is a gift, inviting us to understand art history not as a series of isolated moments but as a tapestry of influences and collaborations.
The Mysterious Fayum Portraits, then, is about connection — across time, cultures, and geographies, all rooted in the gazes of those whose names and stories have been lost to history. It’s about the ways in which art can hold space for multiple identities, multiple truths. And as I think about my and my peers’ work in Flight into Egypt, I see that same expansiveness, that same refusal to be boxed in. It reminds us that identity is slippery, that ownership is complicated, and that the act of creation — whether it’s 2,000 years ago or today — is always a conversation.
The Mysterious Fayum Portraits: Faces from Ancient Egypt (2025) by Euphrosyne Doxiadis is published by Thames & Hudson and is available online and through independent booksellers.