posted
Some Fayum mummies and mummy portraits do have similarities, as this one
Famous reconstruction of a mummy from Graeco-Roman time in Fayum of a little boy whose face also was on a mummy portrait. Scans of its body were used as the basis of a face reconstruction which were compared to the mummy portrait.
The ancient Egyptian boy's "mummy portrait" (left) next to the newly created 3D facial reconstruction (right). (Image credit: Nerlich AG, et al. PLOS One (2020); CC BY 4.0)
quote: In Graeco-Roman times in the Lower-Egyptian Fayoum region, a painted portrait was traditionally placed over the face of a deceased individual. These mummy portraits show considerable inter-individual diversity. This suggests that those portraits were created separately for each individual. In the present study, we investigated a completely wrapped young infant mummy with a typical mummy portrait by whole body CT analysis. This was used to obtain physical information on the infant and provided the basis for a virtual face reconstruction in order to compare it to the mummy portrait. We identified the mummy as a 3–4 years old male infant that had been prepared according to the typical ancient Egyptian mummification rites. It most probably suffered from a right-sided pulmonary infection which may also be the cause of death. The reconstructed face showed considerable similarities to the portrait, confirming the portrait’s specificity to this individual. However, there are some differences between portrait and face. The portrait seems to show a slightly older individual which may be due to artistic conventions of that period.
-------------------- Once an archaeologist, always an archaeologist Posts: 2684 | From: Sweden | Registered: Mar 2020
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posted
The minute I saw that portrait I thought that little boy looked like Riley Curry...
and the reconstruction actually looks a lot like Ryan Curry
The tell tale sign of admixture for that portrait is the way the hair looks
-------------------- It's not my burden to disabuse the ignorant of their wrong opinions Posts: 2699 | From: New York | Registered: Jun 2015
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posted
The Fayum portraits exhibit a lot of variation, from very light skinned people to people with dark skin. It would be interesting if their DNA could be studied to see who they were related to and where their ancestors came from. Who were indigenous, who were of Greek, Roman or of other descendancy? Future research might give more answers.
-------------------- Once an archaeologist, always an archaeologist Posts: 2684 | From: Sweden | Registered: Mar 2020
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posted
It would be interesting to see how this type of realistic art developed, as I don't know of any other precedence for such realism except in Greco-Roman statues. Maybe other regions could not preserve such artwork like Egypt?
quote:Originally posted by Archeopteryx: The Fayum portraits exhibit a lot of variation, from very light skinned people to people with dark skin. It would be interesting if their DNA could be studied to see who they were related to and where their ancestors came from. Who were indigenous, who were of Greek, Roman or of other descendancy? Future research might give more answers.
Posts: 8804 | From: The fear of his majesty had entered their hearts, they were powerless | Registered: Nov 2007
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quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa: Shocking mummy details from the Fayum portraits.
When it does not go like you thought it would! Lol.. the look on Brier's face when the skull is a black African and not the stylized Greek
An additional Fayum mummy reconstruction that did not exactly match the portraiture
quote:"It is possible that during the mummification procedure, when several bodies were being mummified at the same time, a mismatch occurred," Brier said.
The fourth mummy's nose looked more refined in the portrait than in the researchers' prediction, but his "other facial features and proportions were so consistent between the reconstruction and portrait that no mix-up was indicated here," Brier said.
-------------------- It's not my burden to disabuse the ignorant of their wrong opinions Posts: 2699 | From: New York | Registered: Jun 2015
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Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
What a summer harvest. Timely updates made it well worth bumping the thread! Thx.
posted
Afro-Asiatic speakers all over Africa and to a degree in the Middle East, give their children similar hairstyles as you can see on this boy in the Fayum portrait.
quote:Originally posted by Yatunde Lisa: The minute I saw that portrait I thought that little boy looked like Riley Curry...
....The tell tale sign of admixture for that portrait is the way the hair looks
The daughter of Curry doesn't really resemble in terms of facial features the boy in this Fayum portrait, though. However, she's very light skinned with a fair hair color like her father. Besides, the painting is not in pristine condition, and discoloured. That said, the boy may or may not be mixed, we can only speculate here. Just saying.
posted
Read the whole thread again because the click is not clicking
-------------------- It's not my burden to disabuse the ignorant of their wrong opinions Posts: 2699 | From: New York | Registered: Jun 2015
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Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
For me the father resembles the artifact more so than the daughter.
Frontal skull shape seems identical. Forehead, brows, and orbits too. Lips and nose similar, the Fayoumi's are but "pinched" compared to Curry.
but the point I was making to mightwolf is that the reconstructions ( skull ) don't exactly match the portraitures. Some are showing slightly more negro features. Eventhough I don't like that word negro or the designation sub saharan, as these phenotypes are indegenous.. It is clear that the Fayum portraits are of mostly admixed people, who had a range of features as admixed people tend to do. The child has tannish brownish skin even in the portrait and frizzy kinky hair. These are clues IF one knows what one is looking at. This child could be in the Curry family, and I doubt anyone would blink an eye.
But I am going to go with Ryan Curry as my match,
-------------------- It's not my burden to disabuse the ignorant of their wrong opinions Posts: 2699 | From: New York | Registered: Jun 2015
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posted
what does curry's family have to do with this ? They are full of west/north european and west african ancestry they have nothing to do with the genetic make up of egyptians.
Posts: 1779 | From: Somewhere In the Rif Mountains | Registered: Nov 2021
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Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
Any chance any pics of Mr Curry as a 13-15 year old, the age I take the Fayoumi youth portrait for?
For my clarity: is your use of admixed re Fayoumi portraits meaning from two phenotype 'distinct' parents or a more or less fixed type yet wide ranged sets of features due to generations of unrestricted 'mixed' marriages in a locale? BTW not limiting you to those binary choices, fill me in on your view.
Right now I tend to think the portrait subjects ran the gamut of utter mixture of ethnic Lower Egyptian, Macedonia etc nationalized Egyptian, Cyrenaican (Libyan or Greek), Levantine, and Island & north Mediterranean, all of whom were or could've been Roman citizens. I see the child as predominantly ancient Libyan west of Siwa. I've seen its type in a South Philly Italian girl and an Italian co-worker, both had krinkly bushy hair too. No matter where it shows up I mean we know where that frizzy partially relaxed from tight curl/deep wave hair comes from, right?
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And I think I got your point Lisa. Me? I don't go for full fleshed out with added hair(style) and emotive expression "reconstructions". Even if a double-blind product shows anything but a deathmask-like face. Failing those criteria I only see subjective wishful thinking of the artist(s) employed. I doubt ol' Cheddar died all happy faced after whistling a tune.
For the Fayoumi child the reconstruction artist didn't know who or what the subject was until the final stage. For skin thickness some geobiological type had to be assumed. This, and eye choices are where I see slight bias may've entered. Fo now I think the artist recon may in fact resemble a chubby infant more than the 'gaunt' ancient portrait which seems of someone older than an infant to 5 yr old.
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I don't like negro and promote the old The Name Negro its origin and evil use (link) pamphlet. Independent minded black scholars from the 1970s forward have posited the English word negro describes an Afrikan body with a European mentality, subservient slave stock Africans, and an extreme facial type falsely boosted as archetypical. Not at all denying inner Africans in general tend to fuller/fleshier lips and nose or nasal gutter and rectangular orbits or prognathism more than most other peoples. Likewise so do peoples from the Indian Ocean to the South Pacific and Oceania.
Also to me, sub-Sahara(n) Africa(n) is a ruse or euphemism for negro. Notice Western (white European) academe omits Eritrea, Ethiopia, and Somalia from the SSA category. Eritrea is as "SS" as Senegal. Ethiopia as Burkina Faso and Ghana. Somalia as Cameroon and Gabon.
[ insert previously posted latitude map if found ]
South Sudan's not on the maps. Very roughly its border with Sudan runs from where Chad and CAR meet to where the Blue Nile crosses Ethiopia's border.
Also note ancient Sudan (Ta Zeti, Wawat, Kerma, Napata) is, like ancient Egpyt, an oasis ribbon squarely at the east end of the Sahra. Deserts continue on east of the Nile 'oasis'.
For my clarity: is your use of admixed re Fayoumi portraits meaning from two phenotype 'distinct' parents or a more or less fixed type yet wide ranged sets of features due to generations of unrestricted 'mixed' marriages in a locale?
Right now I tend to think the portrait subjects ran the gamut of utter mixture between ethnic Lower Egyptian, Macedonia etc nationalized Egyptian, Cyrenaican (Libyan or Greek), Levantine, and Island & north Mediterranean, all of whom were or could've been Roman citizens.
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And I think I got your point Lisa. Me? I don't go for full fleshed out with hair and emotive expression "reconstructions". Even if a double-blind product shows anything but a deathmask-like face. Failing those criteria I only see subjective wishful thinking of the artist(s) employed.
[ insert previously latitude map if found ]
Yes, you get my drift as did Volney, only others pretend to be obtuse to the discussion at hand, displaying classic troll behavior
quote:Page 133
Among the first Europeans to reflect upon the race of ancient Egyp- tians was Count Constantine de Volney (1757-1820), who visited Egypt between 1783 and 1785. He wrote of the brown-skinned Chris- tian Copts, who formed a great part of the nonurban population, that ‘all have a bloated face, puffed up eyes, flat nose, thick lips; in a word, the true face of the mulatto.’ ’ The count was surprised and puz- zled at finding in Egypt this physical type with which he was familiar in Europe, where it had resulted from matings between white people and Africans or Blacks from the Caribbean. After viewing the Sphinx, he was convinced that a similar process of miscegenation had been at work in Africa, but with Blacks as the majority population and whites the minority in the initial mixture. This led him to write about the Sphinx in words that were disconcerting to the proslavery forces of his day:
Baby Steph... Steph has two AA parents both obviously mixed race, Steph himself marries a AA woman clearly mixed race, and their children all three look typically like a "creole" population like COPTS or many North Africans
-------------------- It's not my burden to disabuse the ignorant of their wrong opinions Posts: 2699 | From: New York | Registered: Jun 2015
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posted
they don't look north african at all wtf are you talking about ?
Posts: 1779 | From: Somewhere In the Rif Mountains | Registered: Nov 2021
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quote:Originally posted by Antalas: they don't look north african at all wtf are you talking about ?
No?
-------------------- It's not my burden to disabuse the ignorant of their wrong opinions Posts: 2699 | From: New York | Registered: Jun 2015
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quote:Originally posted by Antalas: they don't look north african at all wtf are you talking about ?
No?
I'm talking about stephen curry and his family which you just said look north african while they don't
Posts: 1779 | From: Somewhere In the Rif Mountains | Registered: Nov 2021
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quote:Originally posted by Antalas: they don't look north african at all wtf are you talking about ?
No?
I'm talking about stephen curry and his family which you just said look north african while they don't
Sure Jan
-------------------- It's not my burden to disabuse the ignorant of their wrong opinions Posts: 2699 | From: New York | Registered: Jun 2015
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Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
Here we need only recolor the iris and pinch the lips some. Otherwise the non-metrics are very similar.
Take your pick to each their own. Earth's not going to shatter either way.
the analysis said the mummy was a 3-4 year old boy the portrait here looks to me like a person between 14-17 maybe
Posts: 42920 | From: , | Registered: Jan 2010
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Tukuler
multidisciplinary Black Scholar
Member # 19944
posted
The infant mummy’s face—Paleoradiological investigation and comparison between facial reconstruction and mummy portrait of a Roman-period Egyptian child
Andreas G. Nerlich, Lukas Fischer, Stephanie Panzer, Roxane Bicker, Thomas Helmberger, Sylvia Schoske
Facial reconstruction (see also supplementary material)
In order to avoid bias, the facial reconstruction artist was carefully kept away from any images or specific information concerning the portrait. Only at the aforementioned last stage of reconstruction were the colour of the eyes and hair as well the type of hairstyle communicated to the artist in order to assure that the data for these three features would match. Hairstyle and eye colour were manually corrected to conform with the information received.
With the finalization of the facial reconstruction came the first full exchange of data for the reconstruction and the mummy portrait. For further evaluation, the virtual image was compared to biometric data obtained from the portrait. Accordingly, certain specific proportions and dimensions were compared, such as the distance between the horizontal eye line, mouth and nose, but also the width of the eyes, nasal bridge and mouth opening.
[...]
The thickness of this soft tissue layer was reconstructed according to the data given by Manhein et al. [11], which has established reference values for infantile facial soft tissue for Caucasians between 3 and 8 years of age.
[...]
... the eyes were rendered based on a mean eyeball diameter of 22 mm, adjusted to take into account the age of the individual.
[...]
... slightly interpretative adjustments were added to the raw data to include presumed slightly higher fat pads in early infantile age.
quote:Originally posted by Tukuler: For the Fayoumi child the reconstruction artist didn't know who or what the subject was until the final stage. For skin thickness some geobiological type had to be assumed. This, and eye choices are where I see slight bias may've entered. For now I think the artist recon may in fact resemble a chubby infant more than the 'gaunt' ancient portrait which seems of someone older than an infant to 5 yr old.
.
The finished recon is a blend of forensic anthropology and the ancient portrait, wholly true to neither. Basically I have little beef with it, though I'd never would of guessed a Libyan ID for the recon like I did for the portrait.
CNN Dozens of artifacts seized from the Metropolitan Museum of Art Updated 3rd September 2022
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The seized Egyptian objects include painted linen fragments and a portrait of a woman on a panel, Lady with a Blue Mantle, valued at $1.2 million.
. . .
The museum said that it learned from investigators that some of the Egyptian objects it had bought were sold using false ownership histories, fraudulent statements and fake documents from the same network that sold the Met the gilded coffin.
posted
*Yawn* The Fayoum portraits have been discussed multiple times before. I suggest newbies look in the search engine.
Meanwhile, the major problem I see is the cherry picked portraits that are prevalent on the internet showing only the fairest skin types that look the most Greco-Roman.
There are many more portraits like the above that don't get as much attention.
Also we have biological evidence like Irish's 2006 paper on Egyptian odontics from predynastic to postdynastic: Did Egyptians of the Ptolemaic and Roman periods differ significantly from their dynastic antecedents? Again, more post dynastic samples would prove useful in answering this broad question. Moreover, any foreign genetic influence on the indigenous populace likely diminished relative to the distance upriver. However, as it stands, the lone Greek Egyptian (GEG) sample from Lower Egypt significantly differs from all but the small Roman-period Kharga sample (Table 4). In fact, it was shown to be a major outlier that is divergent from all others (Figs. 2, 3, 5). The Greek Egyptians exhibit the lowest frequencies of UM1 cusp 5, three-rooted UM2, five-cusped LM2, and two-rooted LM2, along with a high incidence of UM3 absence, among others (Table 2). This trait combination is reminiscent of that in Europeans and western Asians (Turner, 1985a; Turner and Markowitz, 1990;Roler, 1992; Lipschultz, 1996; Irish, 1998a). Thus, if the present heterogeneous sample is at all representative of peoples during Ptolemaic times, it may suggest some measure of foreign admixture, at least in Lower Egypt near Saqqara and Manfalut. Another possibility is that the sample consists of actual Greeks. Although their total number was probably low (Peacock, 2000), Greek administrators and others were present in Lower Egypt. Future comparisons to actual Greek specimens will help verify this possibility. Lastly, the Roman-period specimens are much more closely akin to the seven dynastic samples. Kharga and especially Hawara are most similar, based on their trait concordance (Table 2), low and insignificant MMDs (Table4), and positions within or near the cluster of 11 or so samples (Fig. 2). El Hesa is more divergent (Figs. 2, 3, 5); this divergence was shown to be driven by several extreme trait frequencies, including very high UI2 interruption groove and UM3 absence, and very low UM1 Carabelli’s trait. As above, the first two traits are common in Europeans and western Asians; the latter is rare in these areas, as well as greater North Africa (Irish, 1993, 1997).Like the Greeks, the Romans did not migrate to Lower and especially Upper Egypt in large numbers (Peacock,2000). As such, the distinctive trait frequencies of El Hesa were probably not due to Roman gene flow. There is no evidence that Kharga and Hawara received such influence. Thus the results, at least for these samples, do not support significant biological differentiation in the Egyptians of this time relative to their dynastic predecessors.Posts: 26239 | From: Atlanta, Georgia, USA | Registered: Feb 2005
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John Bavaro describes how he makes these portraits on an IPhone
He starts with a photo of a person He digitally paints on top of them with his finger set to a small digital brush size. He then removes the original photo layer He does the background as a separate layer and then merges the face on to it
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