Scope and Limitations of the Evidence

As with the archaeological record for earlier periods in Egypt, the surviving evidence is weighted more towards funerary and religious monuments and materials than the public and private contexts of the living inhabitants. Alexandria itself presents a particular problem: the urban development of the modern city from the second decade of the nineteenth century onwards has largely effaced the ancient one, though in itself it produces intermittent archaeological discoveries, some of the most notable arising from the latest phase of development over the last decade or so. Even more than in the city of Rome, archaeology will never yield a substantial amount of evidence for what once existed in painting of the highest quality in Alexandria, though a significant and growing body of mosaics has been discovered. The ancient cemeteries scattered throughout the city include a relative abundance of painted tombs cut into its rocky substrate, and throughout the Nile Valley there are other concentrations of funerary monuments, either in the traditional form of rock-cut tombs, or in built form, like the ‘‘houses’’ of the dead in the extensive Graeco-Roman necropolis at Tuna el-Gebel, now under renewed investigation by Cairo University and the University of Munich. The houses and public buildings of the living, constructed in mud-brick, like the subsidiary buildings which surrounded the great stone temples, have been erased from the record in the Nile Valley, but out of the valley, in the abandoned settlements of the Fayum and in the eastern and western deserts, a blanket of sand has enveloped buildings and preserved painted walls to at least some of their original height; in some cases, even collapsed ceilings may be retrieved in fragments from the fill. With an ever-expanding range of sites all over Egypt under investigation, the material record is steadily increasing: important contributions are coming from the work of the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) of Egypt and the Centre des Etudes Alexandrines on land at Alexandria; and the Polish Centre for Mediterranean Archaeology at its urban heart, in Kom el-Dikka, and at the nearby coastal site of Marina ed-Alamein. The work of various missions in the Fayum has added more systematically to the evidence retrieved from its settlements by expeditions of an earlier era that were more closely focused on the retrieval of papyri; and further afield, exploration of the quarries exploited by the Romans in the eastern desert, and the Roman settlements and mud-brick temples of the Dakhla and Kharga Oases of the western desert, is enabling comparisons to be made between the Delta, the valley and its fringes. Spread throughout Egypt in this way, the evidence is inevitably patchy, and in some cases probably peculiarly local in character, though it is difficult to gauge this, given the lacunose nature of the overall record. None the less, there is significant information being retrieved to feed into the bigger picture of Hellenistic and Roman art. Less rich than other parts of the Greek and Roman world in the survival of mosaics in quantity, and wall-paintings of high quality, Egypt has nonetheless preserved some exceptional examples in these genres, amongst them the ‘‘Sophilos’’ mosaic (see below), one of the most celebrated of signed pavements; and a rare example of later Roman painting on the grand scale (plate 27) - the frescoes in the ‘‘Imperial Chamber’’ within the temple of Amun at Luxor, depicting the tetrarchs and their entourage (Deckers 1979). As this chapter is being written, the joint project

Of the Oriental Institute of Chicago and the American Research Center in Egypt to clean, conserve, and document these unique paintings is reaching completion. Until now, they have been known best via water-color copies made of them in the nineteenth century, a fact which in itself underscores how important for our knowledge of Graeco-Roman art in Egypt are the records made by earlier travelers and Egyptologists, who were able to observe material that was subsequently degraded beyond recognition, or removed.

In one area in particular - the survival of ancient art executed on organic materials - Egypt can claim exceptional importance, since its climate has favored to an unparalleled extent the survival of works executed on wood, textiles, and papyrus; to this can be added the documentary evidence of artistic activity and commerce also preserved on papyrus.