The Graeco-Roman museum in Alexandria
Geoffrey Lenox-Smith visits the archaeological museum in Alexandria, now reopened after a long period of renovation.
roman egypt
Rare Egyptian hat
A rare felt hat from the Roman Period has gone on display for the first time at Bolton Museum, in the north-west of Britain, following conservation work. Dating to c.AD 200, the hat is thought to have belonged to a…
The Mysterious Fayum Portraits: Faces from Ancient Egypt
REVIEW BY J PETER PHILLIPS This seminal work was first published by Thames & Hudson in 1995. The reprint is described by the publishers as a ‘compact hardback edition’ and includes a new foreword by Ahdaf Soueif, an Egyptian novelist…
Ancient Egypt August listings
THE BELOVED OF ISIS: NERO, THE DOMUS AUREA, AND EGYPT This exhibition explores the links between Rome and Egypt in the 1st century AD, and Emperor Nero’s special relationship with Egypt. It includes multimedia exhibits and more than 150 artefacts…
Face to face with Fayum mummy portraits
The Fayum mummy portraits are masterpieces of ancient painting, but are they portraits? With an exhibition of these paintings and golden mummies on view in Manchester, Lucia Marchini speaks to Egyptologist Campbell Price to find out more.
The Mosaics of Alexandria: pavements of Greek and Roman Egypt
Review by Helen Whitehouse Originally published in French (Mosaïques d’Alexandrie: pavements d’Égypte grecque et romaine, 2019), this handsome volume now appears in an excellent English translation by Colin Clement. Excavations in Alexandria, on land and at sea, over the last…
Funerary finds in Fayum
Inside the funerary structure, archaeologists found a number of rock-cut and stone-lined burial chambers containing a variety of burials, ranging from simple interments to examples of high-quality embalming.
A study in purple
Today, more than 1,000 of these mummy portraits survive in museums and collections around the world.
Parsing the properties of Egyptian purple pigments
Between 30 BC and the 3rd century AD, during which period Egypt was a province of the Roman Empire, a practice developed of attaching a portrait of a mummified individual to their mummy wrappings. Approximately 1,100 of these paintings have…