From the 330s on, the presence of a non-Egyptian ruling establishment emanating from one of the most opulent centers of early Hellenistic art, and governing from a new city built in Greek style but incorporating selected elements of traditional Egyptian art, created a culture in which two very different modes of representation were current. The possibilities of combining these to form new genres, using them in parallel, excerpting selected features, or completely rejecting the one for the other, make the history of art in Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt a narrative of diversity that reflects the increasing cultural complexity of Egyptian society. Analysis of the art itself may help us to understand how the members of that society saw themselves, in the choices they made to encapsulate their status and personal identity, and express their beliefs and aspirations.
In a seminal paper published in 1961 Laszlc) Castiglione examined the phenomenon of artistic ‘‘duality’’ as observed in the funerary productions of Roman Egypt, seeing in this ‘‘double style’’ the mingling of Egyptian and Greek elements in a field where imagery has particular potency, in expressing a society’s hopes for commemoration and continuing existence after death. As noted by Riggs (2005: 8-9), the issue concerns not so much the nebulous concept of‘‘style’’ as the existence of two completely different systems of representation, the one an evolving system concerned with conveying ‘‘reality,’’ the material world as seen by the eye and recreated with the aid of devices such as perspective, the other a sophisticated and long-established system aimed at delivering information about the material and divine worlds and actions performed within them by use of a highly regulated canon of images. The peculiarly Egyptian nature of the latter gave it considerable cachet as an artistic ‘‘brand’’ in the world outside Egypt, while at home its importance was maintained well into the Roman Period in the sphere of religion and funerary practices, where it had performative and magical functions. The adoption of Greek art in public and domestic contexts, however, would have flagged the status of its users, and it offered especial potential in delivering portraiture of a truly personal and naturalistic kind, in painting as in sculpture - an important consideration given the emphasis conferred by traditional Egyptian funerary ideology on preserving the deceased’s corporeal image.
Three extant monuments of Ptolemaic date show the incorporation of Greek elements within the formal vocabulary of traditional Egyptian art, in a kind pragmatic ‘‘duality.’’ The most celebrated of them is the temple-tomb of the high priest and sage Petosiris, the most conspicuous feature of the extensive necropolis at Tuna el-Gebel, resting place for the citizens of Hermopolis Magna (mod. Ashmunein). The recent republication of Gustave Lefebvre’s 1923-4 documentation of the tomb with an additional volume presenting a new photographic survey in color (Cherpion et al. 2007) may reanimate the study of this important monument.
The tomb, which contains a Greek visitor’s graffito of the middle of the third century bc extolling the ‘‘wise man’’ Petosiris, has been variously dated to the last quarter of the fourth century, just after the arrival of the Macedonians in Egypt (Menu 1998; Cherpion et al. 2007: 2), or a half century or more later, to the reign of Ptolemy II Philadelphos (Nakaten, in LA 4: 995-8). Although this is strictly outside the brief of this article, since it is decorated in sculpted and painted relief, it makes adjustments to the fundamental iconographic programme used in traditional tomb decoration which are of interest in comparison to the lesser reworking found in later, painted tombs. Within the conventional sequence of scenes decorating the outer of the tomb’s two rooms, the pronaos, Greek forms (and also some Persian) are repeatedly introduced - for clothing, hairstyles, items of furniture, and craft tools; craftsmen and agricultural laborers are dressed in contemporary clothing - short, loose tunics belted at the waist, and conical straw hats - and the faces of those engaged in scenes of work are portrayed with a freedom in facial expression, delineation of age, hairstyles, and beards. Occasionally the innovation extends to representation as well as form - every so often a full-frontal view of a figure breaks the sequence of traditional profile renderings of head and body, or bodies are shown turning in movement. One scene - the sacrifice of bulls at a tomb, with grieving family members (Cherpion et al. 2007: 85-8) - is purely Greek in conception. The decoration seems to be a purposeful attempt to make specific areas of the traditional repertoire ‘‘contemporary,’’ and, in the particular form and extent to which this has been carried out, it remains unique. The presentation of Petosiris himself, however, is notably orthodox within the canon of traditional representation.
By contrast, the reverse phenomenon is observable in a smaller tomb far from the Nile Valley, where there is innovation in the presentation of the tomb-owner himself. The rock-cut tomb of Siamun in the Gebel el-Mawta necropolis of the Siwa Oasis (Lembke 2004) consists of a long room with a total of 12 loculi for the deposition of bodies; its walls and ceiling are painted with traditional funerary scenes and related decoration (including one updated detail, the depiction of the hearse carrying the enshrined, mummified body as a wheeled wagon of Persian type, as in the tomb of Petosiris: Cherpion et al. 2007: 134-5 ); they are executed in a fine style and comparable in several places to the vignettes and texts in Ptolemaic copies of the Book of the Dead. Two of the representations of Siamun, however, diverge from the traditional: on the north wall he is shown as a standing figure in forward movement, but not wholly in the canonical form - the upper part of his body is shown in full profile, his arms before him in the pose of adoration, and his profile head has ample curly hair, and a neat beard and moustache (figure 44.1; Lembke 2004: 367 fig. 8). The treatment of his head, not exclusive to this monument (see Brooklyn 1960: 174,
Figure 44.1 The tomb-owner Siamun, detail of the painted decoration on the north wall of his tomb in the Gebel el-Mawta necropolis, Siwa Oasis. Author’s photograph.
Fig. 334, a fragment of painted shroud, with sculpted parallels) apparently shows us Siamun as he appeared in life, and it is applied to an otherwise more canonical image of him on the west wall as the seated tomb-owner, but the rest of this scene is distinctively different - he is facing his son, a child partly draped in a mantle, who is touching his father’s knee in a gesture of farewell, an image derived from the Greek funerary repertoire (Lembke 2004: 368 fig. 10, 372). Fallen fragments of the architectural decoration from the loculi openings show small ‘‘hellenizing’’ touches here, too, in the form of painted egg-and-dart moulding. A Ptolemaic date for the tomb is generally accepted, but a more precise dating within the period is not so clear ( Lembke, 2004: 372, has noted that the pink skin coloration used for Siamun is not typical before Roman Period), nor is the motivation for these adjustments to the traditional iconography - an expression of Siamun’s ethnic identity, or the furthest-flung example yet recorded of a concern to represent the deceased in ‘‘lifetime’’ form at salient points in the funerary progression (Riggs 2005:134-142)?
Some of the formal features of Siamun’s tomb have been invoked in the discussion of the third monument cited here, one of three mud-brick shrines revealed at Kom Madi, 1 km south-east of the settlement of Narmouthis (Medinet Madi) in the Fayum (Bresciani 2003). This one consists of three rooms and a painted forecourt. The central room, equipped with an altar, was also painted: a figure of Osiris flanked by Isis and Nephthys on the rear wall, and other divinities, together with the feeding of sacred ibises and offering of incense, on the adjoining ones. Outside, however, the paintings have a totally different character - on the entrance wall of the court files of bearded, curly-haired soldiers marching towards the entrance, their clothing, boots, and weapons distinguishing them as Greeks. A taller figure in a long-sleeved garment, a red fillet around his curly hair, faces away from them, and even larger figures, only partly preserved, flank the entrance to the cult-room - traces of something like a smiting-scene to the left, and on the right a military figure pouring a libation on to an altar while an Egyptian goddess stands by; a further large-scale painting on the right-hand wall of the court shows desert game fleeing before a mythological or divinized figure whose red-booted feet stand within a vehicle drawn by griffin-felines.
The decoration respects the conventions of traditional Egyptian art in the registered composition, the differential sizing of the figures, and their depiction in profile views, with solid coloring applied within linear outlines; but it also presents a serious, albeit not very skilled, attempt to portray foreign actors within a traditional ritual context. Dating the monument to the end of the second century bc, the excavator has suggested a connection with the divinized Alexander the Great, perhaps to be identified as the figure facing away from the files of soldiers, and has noted the parallel between the large figures and the later images of hero-divinities at other Fayum sites (below, p.1026).
World History
