Edwards, Amelia B.: Pharaohs, fellahs and explorers (New York, NY, 1892)

98

PHARAOHS, FELLAHS, AND EXPLORERS.

■were brought to light. One series was discovered by Arab
diggers at a place called Rubaiyat, in the Fayum. These
were purchased by 11 err Graff, an Austrian gentleman, and
have been made the subject of a pamphlet by Dr. Ebers.
The other series was discovered about the same time by Mr.
Petrie in the cemetery of this Graeco-Roman town on the
Labyrinth plateau.

The mummies adorned by these portraits were enclosed
in fine cases solidly stuccoed and brilliantly painted, an
oval space being left over the face of the mummy, in which
the panel was inserted. In one instance the panel, instead
of being laid over the dead face, was found enclosed in a

frame of the modern " Oxford
pat tern," and deposited beside
the mummy in his tomb. It
had evidently hung in his
house during the lifetime of
the sitter, the cord by which it
was anciently suspended being
yet knotted round the corners
The heads are painted of
life size, on thin cedar panels
measuring about seventeen
inches by nine inches, and
varying from one-sixteenth to
a quarter of an inch in thick-
ness. In the earliest specimens
the panel is found to have been
first covered with a thin coat
of stucco, on which the por-
trait is painted in tempera,;
but this process was dry and
brittle, and the color flaked off, which caused it soon to be
abandoned in favor of a medium of melted beeswax. The
colors, being in powder, mixed readily with the wax, and
were laid on with a stiff reed-brush fuzzed out at the end.
such as had been used by the old Egyptian painters from

EGYPTIAN HOT.