Mummy Portraits and the White Gaze

This essay was part of a 2026 NAPS Conference Book Review Panel devoted to Things Unseen Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World by Ellen Muehlberger. Read the full forum here. 

In her latest book, Ellen Muehlberger asks us to sit in the tensive space between knowing and seeing. Throughout her faux-lecture series turned collected essays, she presses on how “ancient people knew differently.”[1] While the first three chapters explore how late ancient Christians used what they “knew” to find evidence and create a vision of others and themselves, her fourth essay turns to our own engagements of the past. She eloquently shows how what we “see” – such as Egyptian Fayyum funerary portraits – offers us an illusion of “knowing” ancient peoples, when in fact what we witness is evidence of our own modern fixation on “individuality, essence, and truth in faces.”[2]

For those who may not have read the chapter, I want to begin by offering a very brief description. But please just go read it, as I cannot possibly do it justice here. Muehlberger asserts that the “so-called Fayyum portraits” are modern art objects constructed in and alongside a world in which photography had emerged. Thus, the mummy portraits were valued “by defacing, deracinating, then hyping and exhibiting the pieces, thereby training a market for them.”[3] She then highlights how the mummy portraits function as affective machines meant to “enthrall.”[4] In particular, she points to the ways nineteenth-century photo albums offered the epistemological promise of proper genealogy and parentage, a force then turned on the new art objects of mummy portraits. And thus, ethnicities and families were projected onto these late ancient objects, but always with an air of superiority for the Greeks or Romans over the Egyptians.[5] She concludes her chapter by highlighting how this modern affective machine that produces wonder is often emblematic of the larger relationship between knowledge and evidence for those of us who study antiquity.

Because this essay concerns a collection of fragments and the ways in which they were created by Theodor Graf and Flinders Petrie’s defacement of Egyptian mummified bodies during the Roman period, my response is likewise somewhat fragmentary. The modern disembodiment that Muehlberger traces has had consequences for my thinking and ultimately inspired multiple registers of questions and experiences of the joy, the freedom, of exploring in several different directions all at once. Turning over both Muehlberger’s argument and the objects from which her argument are constructed again and again, I hope to capture glimpses of possible “knowing.” And so, I take up Muehlberger’s suggestion that what we are doing in our study of the past is thinking with riddles, continuing “to thumb the feeling of not knowing, returning back to [our] ignorance, feeling the sense of revelation.”[6]

One major question I have been returning to repeatedly is whether we can re-face defaced mummies. Or, to put it another way, how might we recouple images of faces to their rightful proximity to embodiment? The scholarly collaborative Ancient Panel Painting: Examination, Analysis, and Research (or APPEAR) serves as a primary locus for exploration of the mummy masks, regularly referred to by its scholars as the Fayyum portraits, held by numerous museums globally. According to my recent count of the partners listed on the website, 64 museums currently participate in sharing research.[7] Using X-ray and CT scanning technologies to view the mummified body, we are promised to better “know” the ancient world by taking a peek under the mummy’s wrappings. Noting this phenomenon, Muehlberger describes this use of “new photographic techniques” as a “new defacement, a century after Europeans had harvested the paintings and gathered them into a genre of portraits.”[8] In 2020, the J. Paul Getty Museum published an open access volume of the APPEAR Project.[9] In a chapter titled “Invisible Brushstrokes Revealed,” its authors describe using a SPEX CrimeScope unit, a machine typically used at crime scenes to detect forensic evidence, to examine several mummy portraits.[10] The SPEX enacts a form of visible-induced visible luminescence (or VIVL) imaging that uses radiation to detect unseen colors by causing the hidden to fluoresce. At 535 to 555 nanometers hidden brushstrokes appeared on three paintings. This particular fluorescence range is associated with lake pigment madder, a reddish pinkish hue extracted from plant roots, that was frequently used in ancient paintings.[11] What were these brush strokes? Did they function as draft outlines to be painted over? Were they part of what was originally meant to be visible in the finished product and they have merely faded with the passing of time? The SPEX made the unseen once more visible. And yet, now that they are seen, they only add to the accumulation of layers of unseenness present in these objects. What we now look at is not only a disembodied face, removed from its original context within a larger mummified body, but also a face that may not reflect what was originally painted. Between the modern “corrections” made through melting wax by Flinders Petrie, the pastiche compilations of partial portraits for profit by nineteenth century archaeological harvesters, and now these “undetected brushstrokes” of unknown function, the ability to see anything “real” fades further away.[12]

Building on Muehlberger’s discussion of scholarship on Fayyum portraits as “toggling back-and-forth” between describing them as Egyptian and not, I also want to think about how Romano-Egyptian mummy portraits are often extracted from the larger study of Coptic art.[13] Notoriously derided for being “folk art” by Klaus Wessel, Coptic art has often, following his work, been divided into two substrands, “a provincial Greek and a Coptic.”[14] His 1963 book opens with “an imaginary museum of Coptic art,” in which he places what he considers rather different quality depictions of the same or similar themes alongside one another. One of his early examples is a frieze of Herakles:[15]

First, an unfortunately very damaged relief from Ahnas, now in Cairo, which portrays Herakles as the slayer of a lion, flanked by two Victories…The forms of this relief are not entirely characteristic of the antique. Thus, for example, the hero’s muscles are very crudely suggested; his body is lean and appears to be constructed from a geometrical figure, not however following natural forms. The folds on the Victory’s robe are strictly parallel, and unnaturally arranged… The proportions nowhere agree exactly…Also it is clearly – the town having been predominantly occupied by Greeks – a provincial late antique degeneration from the eastern antique, far removed inwardly and outwardly from the style of the Greek late antique, representing nevertheless a special trend in the furthest provinces, perhaps influenced by the Near East, and with nothing in common with the Egyptian.

Wessel goes on to date the frieze and its accompanying counterpart, which he describes as “an artistically very feeble provincial Roman work,” to the third or fourth century under the logics that Herakles could no longer be celebrated after Egypt became Christian nor that a Roman theme of the third century might still appear in sixth-century “far-off Egypt.”[16] While critique of Wessel’s characterizations were given by Pierre du Bourguet within a few years and have again been offered in more recent scholarship, the dating of many objects still tends to rely on such oversimplified understandings of Egypt as somehow a style set apart from Greek or Roman even as the object is of Egyptian provenance.[17] This circular logic that Egyptian art looks one way and therefore anything else found in Egypt must not be Egyptian but foreign requires a racial presumption that Greekness or Romanness was somehow able to maintain an uncontaminatedness vis-à-vis Egyptianness. This frieze comes from Ahnas, the same region from which several portrait mummies were unearthed. These objects share not only provenance, but also a similar type of racism that lies latent, unseen – the assumption that both the quality of the technique and the faces of the individuals portrayed in the so-called mummy portraits can’t be Egyptian but must be foreign.

And if we re-emplot these painted panels on mummies within the realm of Coptic art, then they need to be resituated also within Egyptian burial praxes. Not in the voyeuristic depiction of Egyptian burials as “bizarre” ala Susan Walker, but rather within the cultural logics that undergirded Egyptian beliefs in the afterlife.[18] They were not designed to be hung as floating, disembodied faces in a museum exhibit in Britain. They were not crafted to transport us back into an experience where we suddenly imagine we might speak to a living person from late ancient Egypt. As Muehlberger compellingly has shown, that affective machine of the mummy portrait has been offered as a modern product derived from defacement. But what might we imagine they were for when they were put on the bodies of deceased individuals? Despite the deep desire by many modern scholars to substitute in the mummy panels for what we imagine as the “realism” of Roman portraiture, we can be pretty sure that most of these masks were not painted to be hung due to the intentional contouring of the wood panels and their life-like size.[19] Thus, we cannot easily situate these portraited mummies within the memorialization practices of Roman burial. Instead, a more useful context is within the longer history of Egyptian burial practices. Whether we are discussing the more “idealized” faces of Pharoanic-era mummies or the more “realistic” faces of Roman-era Egyptian mummies, we can reasonably assert that one function of these faces was for recognition. Traditionally, the mask served to guide an aspect of the soul of a deceased individual back into their body. There were both ka and ba spirits that filled the body. The ka was something like your body’s double, whereas the ba could wander away like a flying bird. Thus, the ba bird is often depicted on the body of the mummy. Part of mummification included the ceremony of the “Opening of the mouth” so that the ba might return, might we say “reanimate” the body. But given the thick layers of wrappings, how was your ba to recognize your body? Here is where mummy masks activate: for one to be reconstituted fully again in the afterlife, you had to have some recognizable, some legible depiction of oneself displayed. That is, whether the face was idealized or realistic it had to have markers that would serve the purpose of self-recognition, whatever this self was. Such images quite plausibly also doubled as markers for recognition by the family, the larger community. But part of what we must recognize is that these masks were not for others and thus were not faces in the ways we think of them in modernity.

Which led me to my longest ponderings: trying to think through what the world was like before photography. Because Muehlberger’s argument is equally about the ways in which living in a world in which photography exists, what we might call “a photograph world,” fundamentally changes how we know and see. Can we imagine at all what it is like to live in a world without the photograph? Without its possibility in a world so full of selfies?

Marlon Barrios Solano self-describes as “a Venezuelan-American interdisciplinary artist, creative technologist, and researcher with a background in dance, software engineering, and cognitive science.” He currently teaches at the University of Florida, where he is Maker-in-Residence at the Center for Arts, Migration, and Entrepreneurship (CAME), and his work explores the intersection of AI, art, and diasporas. In one of his art pieces, “Faciality Monologues,” Barrios Solano takes photographs he snapped of mannequins on the streets of Amsterdam who struck him with “their eerie realism” and “enlivens” them through deep fake videos. Each short video constructed via AI produces a “digital representation of life” that speaks of the relationship of the body to the head and the head to the face. Engaging Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of faciality, the life-like “movement” of the digital face becomes its own overcoded signifier, reflecting an ever-expanding web between “artificial life, physical form, and philosophical thought.”

To be clear, Barrios Solano is intentional in his work. He explains, “my work rehearses futures where identity is queer and translocal, archives speak back, cognition is distributed, and the Global South doesn’t ask for permission to imagine otherwise. I use speculative AI not to predict the future, but to liberate it, to emancipate it.” Despite Barrios Solano’s articulation of his work, his 2023 piece’s reliance on AI and the concept of faciality makes visible not only this problem of oversignification of the face, but potentially also the unseen problem of raciality that lurks: all the mannequins code white. Moreover, the history of AI as built on algorithimic preference for the white male face is well-attested. Even as Barrios Solano playfully invites us into the game of co-creation with generative AI for the purposes of resistance and engaging futurity, the specter of race also haunts Barrios Solano’s use of Deleuze and Guattari, whose work has been deeply influential in theoretical circles, including those of critical race theory. Joe Krall, a graduate student who tragically died before he could finish and publish his dissertation, provocatively argued that Deleuze and Guattari’s own concept of faciality as a white wall with black holes participates in an anti-black logic of whiteness as presence, fullness, that is dependent on prior violence to the idea of a black face. What his argument (and the larger discourse of afro-pessimism in which he was participating) suggests is that the ways in which we make meaning out of faces are always entangled with the photograph-world’s construction of racial delineation for colonialist white supremacy.

Even without the illusions and alternative futures being offered to us by the rapid expansion of AI, we live in a world where faces are oversignified. Where readings are made of facial expressions, of facial decorations (make-up and the like), of skin pigmentation, in order to “know” the Other. And so, we project those onto the past because we project them onto ourselves and pretend that what we see allows us to know something about the individual. The living, non-digital face we look at does not move without the head, not just in a swiveling left to right, up and down, but also in the neural networks that produce speech, the hands that paint make-up on the face, the contortions and twitches of facial muscles that signal affect/emotion, signals that can be read quite differently depending on the skin tone conveying them. We do not see the genetic code, the DNA, that flows through the entire body attached to the head. The face in our time is only a mask and so successful has this slippage been that we have the illusion of seeing ourselves when we see our facemask in a photograph. But the proliferation of camera filters underscores not only how oversignified the face has become, but also how desired the malleability of the face is. Thinking about this last sentence in fact resulted in a pause and a quick Google search. I wondered and queried: is there a SnapChat mummy portrait filter I might try on?

Christine Luckritz Marquis is Associate Professor of Church History at Union Presbyterian Seminary. Her teaching and research expertise explore early Christian communities and their practices, especially late ancient communities in Egypt, Syria, Ethiopia, and the Arabian Peninsula. Her interests include food, memory, and spatial practices, the role of violence in identity formation, racial and ethnic discourses, material culture, and Christian interactions with neighboring Christians as well as non-Christians, especially Jews and Muslims. Her first book is Death of the Desert: Monastic Memory and the Loss of Egypt’s Golden Age (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2022). The book explores how memory and spatial practices were transformed by acts of violence among Egyptian ascetics. She has also co-edited and translated The History of the Great Deeds of Bishop Paul of Quentos and Priest John of Edessa, Texts from Christian Late Antiquity volume 29 (Piscataway, New Jersey: Gorgias Press, 2010). She has also published book chapters, articles, and translations. She is currently researching the history of sources of sweetness and their relationship to understandings of the divine and afterlife.

[1] Ellen Muehlberger, Things Unseen: Essays on Evidence, Knowledge, and the Late Ancient World (Oakland: University of California Press, 2025), 7.

[2] Muehlberger, Things Unseen, 11.

[3] Muehlberger, Things Unseen, 128.

[4] Muehlberger, Things Unseen, 124. 

[5] As Muehlberger succinctly notes, the constructed modern art objects of the so-called Fayyum portraits have thus become “the child of this cultural relationship between Egypt and her colonizer.” (Muehlberger, Things Unseen, 145).

[6] Muehlberger, Things Unseen, 152. 

[7] “Appear Project | Getty Projects,” Getty Center, accessed July 1, 2026, https://www.getty.edu/projects/appear-project/.

[8] Muehlberger, Things Unseen, 139.

[9] Marie Svoboda and Caroline R. Cartwright, eds., Mummy Portraits of Roman Egypt: Emerging Research from the APPEAR Project (Los Angeles: Getty Publications, 2020).

[10] Evelyn (Eve) Mayberger, Jessica Arista, Marie Svoboda, and Molly Gleeson, “Invisible Brushstrokes Revealed: Technical Imaging and Research of Romano-Egyptian Mummy Portraits” in Mummy Portraits of Roman Egypt, 79–89.

[11] For a discussion of madder itself, see Richard Newman and Glenn Alan Gates, “The Matter of Madder in the Ancient World” in Mummy Portraits of Roman Egypt, 24–33. 

[12] Muehlberger, Things Unseen, 131 fn. 34. Here she is citing James Fenton, “The Mummy’s Secret,” New York Review of Books, July 17, 1997.

[13] Muehlberger, Things Unseen, 150.

[14] Klaus Wessel, Coptic Art, trans. Jean Carroll and Sheila Hatton (West Germany: Thames and Hudson, 1965), 231.

[15] Wessel, Coptic Art, 13–14. 

[16] Wessel, Coptic Art, 14. 

[17] Pierre M. du Bourguet, The Art of the Copts, trans. Caryll Hay-Shaw (New York: Crown Publishers, 1967; English translation 1971). For far better analysis of Coptic art, see Elizabeth S. Bolman’s work, especially Monastic Visions: Wall Paintings in the Monastery of St. Antony at the Red Sea (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2002) and her edited volume, The Red Monastery Church: Beauty and Asceticism in Upper Egypt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2016). 

[18] Susan Walker, “Mummy Portraits and Roman Portraiture” in Ancient Faces: Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt, eds. Susan Walker and Morris Bierbrier (London: British Museum, 1997), 16. As Muehlberger rightly asks, “if it was Roman, how ‘bizarre’ and ‘Egyptian’ could it be when practiced in Egypt?” (Things Unseen, 144 fn. 61.)

[19] Caroline R. Cartwright, “Depicting the Dead: Ancient Egyptian Mummy Portraits | British Museum,” The British Museum, 2020, accessed July 1, 2026; Caroline R. Cartwright, “Understanding Wood Choices for Ancient Panel Painting and Mummy Portraits in the APPEAR Project through Scanning Electron Microscopy,” in Mummy Portraits of Roman Egypt, 19.

[20] Marlon Barrios, “Transdisciplinary Arts + AI + Creativity + Cognition,” accessed July 1, 2026, https://marlonbarrios.github.io/.

[21] Marlon Barrios, “Faciality Monologues,” 2023, accessed July 1, 2026, https://medium.com/@marlon_21867/faciality-monologues-a7b741a82aff.

[22] Marlon Barrios, “Long Bio,” accessed July 1, 2026, https://marlonbarrios.github.io/long_bio/.

[23] Joy Buolamwini, “Gender Shades: Intersectional Accuracy Disparities in Commercial Gender Classification,” Proceedings of Machine Learning Research 81 (2018): 1–15.

[24] Joe Krall, “Facing the Light: Deleuze and the Critique of Faciality,” N-Determination and Critical Practices of Resistance Conference: A Graduate Student Conference, University of California – Irvine, March 13, 2015.