The Beautiful Burial in Roman Egypt: Art, Identity and Funerary Religion.

• Author: Corbelli, Judith

The Beautiful Burial in Roman Egypt: Art, Identity and Funerary Religion. By CHRISTINA RIGGS. Oxford Studies in Ancient Culture and Representation. Oxford: OXFORD: OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS, 2005. Pp. xxiii + 334. illus. $150.

The funerary material from Roman Egypt (30 B.C. to A.D. 450) encompasses a wide variety of forms and decoration ranging from purely Egyptian or purely Greek composition to material presenting an amalgam of these features. This volume, which is based on Riggs' doctoral thesis, concentrates on those categories incorporating elements of Greek and Roman portraiture into Egyptian burial assemblages. The author deliberately excludes the most well known of these forms, the painted mummy portraits, as these have been the focus of the majority of studies to date, as well as the Egyptianized Graeco-Roman material from Alexandria and the Greek settlements. Riggs' study is the first work to correlate and comprehensively discuss the funerary material from Middle and Upper Egypt, bringing together categories of often poorly recorded material, analyzing stylistic development and workmanship, reassessing dating criteria, and offering insightful new methods of interpretation.

Chapter one investigates how and why people chose to decorate their dead in this manner and discusses the evidence within the overarching themes of art, identity, and funerary religion. In Roman Egypt, emphasis was placed on the embellishment of the body, rather than its place of interment, and this developed into forms of decoration combining traditional Egyptian iconography with the naturalistic characteristics of the incoming culture. Although it was categorized in earlier studies as of "mixed" style, Riggs suggests that a better understanding of the material may be gleaned by examining how the artistic traditions came to interact with each other. She proposes that the naturalistic portrayal of individuals wearing contemporary clothing and hairstyles indicates a desire to perpetuate the image of the deceased as they had been in life, and that the emphasis on the embellishment of the body, rather than the tomb, developed into the need to represent all the bodily functions, leading to gender-based images.

Chapter two examines references to gender in funerary art and texts. In the Rhind Papyri from Thebes, the deceased are associated, in both words and vignettes, with the funerary deities Osiris and Hathor. Riggs relates this textual evidence to groups of coffins...