Egyptian culture permeated the burial practices of successive conquerors of the country. Witness the sublime portraits that adorn the mummies found in the oasis of Fayoum. Interview with Françoise Dunand, professor emeritus of the history of religions at Marc-Bloch University in Strasbourg.
Mummy found in the Fayoum oasis.
Sciences et Avenir:The Late Period saw the Egyptian and Greco-Roman religions rub shoulders. How is the meeting?
Francoise Dunand: The era is in syncretism, and the gods of each other coexist. Depending on one's needs, one venerates Greek or indigenous deities. Egyptian culture remains very much alive, even if mixed marriages are frequent under the Ptolemies. For example, in the villages of the oasis of Fayoum, located one hundred kilometers south-west of Cairo, yet a Hellenic colony, Egyptian temples are as numerous as Greek sanctuaries. We even found the archives of a school where the two languages were taught simultaneously.
Sarcophagi decorated with Roman-style portraits have also been discovered in Fayoum… The history of this place seems complex.
Three centuries before our era, the first Ptolemies undertook drainage works there, managing to gain 120,000 hectares of agricultural land. Then villages were created to welcome Greek settlers.
Sciences et Avenir:The Late Period saw the Egyptian and Greco-Roman religions rub shoulders. How is the meeting?
Francoise Dunand: The era is in syncretism, and the gods of each other coexist. Depending on one's needs, one venerates Greek or indigenous deities. Egyptian culture remains very much alive, even if mixed marriages are frequent under the Ptolemies. For example, in the villages of the oasis of Fayoum, located one hundred kilometers south-west of Cairo, yet a Hellenic colony, Egyptian temples are as numerous as Greek sanctuaries. We even found the archives of a school where the two languages were taught simultaneously.
Sarcophagi decorated with Roman-style portraits have also been discovered in Fayoum… The history of this place seems complex.
Three centuries before our era, the first Ptolemies undertook drainage works there, managing to gain 120,000 hectares of agricultural land. Then villages were created to accommodate Greek settlers. Because from 305 BC. AD, the Ptolemaic kingdom enlisted many mercenaries from Greece and Asia Minor. To avoid, when they were demobilized, having to pay for their return journey, the authorities offered them agricultural concessions. The Fayoum therefore became a center of Hellenistic civilization. But the Greeks adopted certain Egyptian traditions such as mummification, instead of the cremation they had practiced until then. A custom that the wealthy Romans would take up when they conquered the country in 30 BC. All the Fayoum portraits, the only ones on wood handed down to us from antiquity, date from the 1 st on the 3 th -4 e century AD, none from the Ptolemaic era.
What do these exceptional portraits teach us?
First, that mummification attracts the men and women of that time. Both Greeks and Romans apparently widely adopted this funerary practice. There are between 900 and 1,000 of these mummies whose cardboard coffin includes a portrait at face level, inserted in the strips. The imprecision of the figure comes from the fact that since the discovery of these paintings in 1888, clandestine excavators seized them in order to sell them, and that most are now part of private collections.
These portraits are incredibly human. The encaustic technique (hot wax mixed with pigments) gives the deceased a very lively expression. The faces are generally smooth, and it can be assumed that the portraits were made when the people were young or in their prime. The craftsmanship of these paintings is obviously Roman. It recalls the best ceramics from Pompeii. But this Roman style is at the service of Egyptian deities. Thus, the deceased, dressed in his Roman toga, is often surrounded by Anubis and Osiris. A "triptych" of this kind has even been found with a string allowing it to be hung on a wall, which suggests that it may have been used to adorn a domestic altar. These painted faces do not replace traditional funerary masks, but serve to emphasize the importance of the head being preserved for the survival of the deceased. Osiris must not be mistaken about his identity. Also the name is inscribed on the portrait, but also on the sarcophagus and the formulas of the Book of the Dead accompanying the deceased. In any case, this practice was to be reserved for high society. The costumes, the jewels, the attitudes refer to a ruling class.
At El-Deir, in the oasis of Kharga, five cemeteries have been unearthed covering nine centuries around the year 0. How have burial rites evolved over this long period?
These necropolises allow us to date the emergence of Christianity. In the first four cemeteries, the bodies are deposited in collective graves, the deceased mummified according to traditional techniques. The material that surrounds them - sarcophagi, masks, statuettes of divinities - is characteristic of Egyptian religion, without any influence, or almost, of Greek culture, yet very present at that time. The 4th century AD necropolis, on the other hand, is made up of individual graves where the deceased are placed facing east, dressed in the clothes they wore during their lifetime, with leafy crosses next to them. braided palm. The Christian religion is spreading, but the inhabitants continue to have themselves mummified, although more summarily.
Life in the afterlife, final judgement... Egyptian religion seems to have invented the bases of monotheistic religions. How do you explain it?
We cannot exclude a relationship between the practices of ancient Egyptian religion and those of primitive Christianity:these two religions coexisted in Egypt for several centuries. When Christianity took hold, at the end of the 4 e century, the Egyptians, who previously went to consult the oracles of their traditional gods, turned to the Christian saints. But the vision of the world and of man that these religions have seems quite different to me. The Christian (or Muslim) notion of "paradise", a reward for merit in this world, is very foreign to Egypt. For the Egyptians, what is desirable is to lead after death a "second life" analogous to the first, which is considered fundamentally good, contrary to the traditional Christian point of view. All religions strive to answer essential questions:the origin of the world and of life, death and what might come after. Some of their answers may seem quite close. Very few religions have resigned themselves to teaching that there is nothing after death... But they have tried to describe this "after" each in their own way, sometimes by borrowing images from elsewhere:there is therefore not impossible that the theme of the last judgment comes from Egypt.
This article is from the special issue of Sciences et Avenir "Egypt:the invention of eternity", published in April 2019.