The Materiality of Death in the Transitional Phase: The Funerary Landscape of Roman Egypt

This lecture is part of the ISAW Library events series and will take place in person at ISAW, made possible with the generous support of the Metropolitan Museum of Art and New York Chapter of the American Research Center in Egypt.

Registration is required at THIS LINK.

Imagine walking through an Egyptian necropolis in the aftermath of the Roman conquest and crossing the entrance of a typical elite tomb. You would have been struck by the richness of its decorative program and burial equipment. Just as in the preceding centuries, each element inside the tomb seems to have played a precise role in the long journey of the deceased to the underworld, from the inscriptions running on the walls of the funerary chamber to the ritual texts painted or carved on the funerary objects surrounding the deceased's body. Beyond doubt, inscriptions were omnipresent in this context; as if they were in a sort of dialogue, ritual texts on shrouds, canopic chests, coffins, mummy boards, labels and papyrus rolls concurred in protecting the deceased and ensuring their survival in the afterlife.

In the collective imaginary the funerary practices of Roman Egypt are too often perceived as a mere echo of the Pharaonic tradition, largely deprived of their original ritual significance. The Roman conquest is thus thought to have triggered a swift and irremediable transformation of the Egyptian funerary habits under the influence of new beliefs, rendering many of the “native” cultural elements but pale reflections of the past. Yet, when one considers the evidence provided by recent archaeological investigations and re-evaluates funerary artefacts today kept in museum collections, Egyptian mortuary practices appear to have remained much closer to the Pharaonic tradition than hitherto thought. Indeed, despite the influence of funerary customs and artistic trends introduced by foreign settlers, the funerary landscape of Roman Egypt still reflected, in many ways, an abiding adherence to Dynastic archetypes.

This talk will reconsider the paradigm of a “rapid Egyptian cultural decline" by providing a new perspective on the funerary panorama of Roman Egypt. The comparative study of funerary artifacts that differ with respect to materiality and function and the integration of the data provided by archaeological investigations will demonstrate how funerary customs, even at this late stage of Egyptian history, adapted to a changing multicultural landscape while remaining firmly embedded in the Pharaonic tradition.

Dr. Leah Mascia is a Post-Doctoral researcher in Egyptology and Coptology and head of the "Inscribing Spaces" team in the Cluster of Excellence "Understanding Written Artifacts" at Hamburg University's Center for the Study of Manuscript Cultures. She is also a Post-Doctoral at the Egyptological Seminar of the Freie Universität in Berlin and the Principal Investigator of the project “The Long Journey to the Underworld” (March 2022-December 2025), which studies the production of inscribed funerary artifacts in Egypt between the Roman and the Late Antique periods. A trained field archaeologist and papyrologist, Dr. Mascia is a senior member of the Archaeological Mission of the University of Barcelona working in the ancient site of Oxyrhynchus, where she is in charge of the papyrological and epigraphic documentation, and a senior member of the Archaeological mission of the University of Urbino investigating the ancient city of Cyrene (mod. Libya). Her first monograph, The Transition from Traditional Cults to the Affirmation of Christian Beliefs in the City of Oxyrhynchus, will be published in Fall 2025 by Franz Steiner.

The lecture will be followed by a reception.

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Contact

David M. Ratzan, dr128@nyu.edu.