Late Ptolemaic Period-early Roman Period, 1st century BCE
Artist:
Egyptian; probably from Hawara, Egypt
About this artwork
Funerary masks protected the head and chest of a mummified body. They present an idealized version of the wearer, ensuring that they would continue to breathe, eat, hear, see, and speak in the next life. Preserving the body and its individual parts through mummification or depiction was essential to life after death in ancient Egypt. Potent symbols, such as the amulets shaped like anatomical hearts strung around the neck of the mask here, provided an extra layer of protection. For ancient Egyptians the heart—not the brain—was the center of thought and emotion. In the final judgment, a tribunal of gods weighed the deceased’s heart against the feather of Maat (truth) to determine whether they had led a just life, which included providing for the poor, widows, and orphans and avoiding misdeeds such as theft and murder. A balanced scale granted entrance to the afterlife, while a heavy heart doomed its owner to an eternity of nonexistence.
Date
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Art Institute of Chicago, Thirty-second Annual Report: June 1, 1910–June 1, 1911 (Art Institute of Chicago, 1911), pp. 19, 62.
Thomas George Allen, A Handbook of the Egyptian Collection (Chicago: The Art Institute of Chicago, 1923), pp. 16,17 (ill.).
Emily Teeter, Egyptian Art, Museum Studies: Ancient Art at The Art Institute of Chicago, vol. 20, no. 1 (1994), pp. 29-30 (ill.), no. 15.
Karen B. Alexander, “From Plaster to Stone: Karen B. Alexander, “From Plaster to Stone: Ancient Art at the Art Institute of Chicago,” in Karen Manchester, Recasting the Past: Collecting and Presenting Antiquities at the Art Institute of Chicago (Chicago: Art Institute of Chicago; New Haven: Yale University Press, 2012), p. 26.
Roberta Casagrande-Kim, ed., When the Greeks Ruled Egypt: From Alexander the Great to Cleopatra, with contributions by Mary C. Greuel et al., exh. cat. (New York: Institute for the Study of the Ancient World, 2014), 19, fig. 1-1.
Sandra E. Knudsen, with contributions by Rachel C. Sabino, “Cats. 155-156 Two Mummy Portraits: Curatorial Entry,” in Roman Art at the Art Institute of Chicago (Art Institute of Chicago, 2016), para 24, fig. 155-156.7.
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