Might fuck around and post some Late Antiquity Egyptian mummy portraits because I find them incredibly striking and profound masterpieces portraying a timeless aspect of our shared human condition.

I remember seeing these at the Met when I was really little and being kind of hypnotized. It's amazing that they're not that well known, or that when we think of antiquity whitewashed marble sculptures come into mind and not these.

Most of the Fayum portraits were discovered in the early 20th-century when Egypt was colonized by the British Empire. At the time racial science was in vogue among Europeans and it was believed that ancient Egyptians were light-skinned before being degenerated by race-mixing.

I can't but think that the colonial archaeologists and Egyptologists who discovered these seemingly ageless beauties were deeply unsettled by the deeply realistic depictions of what they believed to be the ancestors and legitimators of European civilization and its imperial rule.

Anyways here are three more of them and that's the end of my thread thanks for reading.