Mummy of Artemidora

An item at Metropolitan Museum of Art

This mummified body of a woman named Artemidora is still in the orginal linen wrappings and lavishly equipped with appliqués and an elaborate funerary mask. The mask depicts a young woman lying flat as if upon her bier. Her hair is arranged in tiers of snail curls over her forehead. Alongside her face flows a black Egyptian-style wig, the long locks bound with narrow rings of gold in pharaonic fashion. She wears a Roman-style dark red tunic with black clavi (stripes) edged in gold. The jewelry includes snake bracelets and gold ball earrings. At the back of the head is a support decorated with imagery signifying rebirth, including a dark blue glass scarab beetle. Attached to the wrappings of the mummy are gold appliqué figures of the deities Osiris, Isis and Nephthys. On the bottom of the foot is an image of the god Anubis bearing the disk of the moon. Set in a tabula ansata (tablet with handles in latin) above this is a conventional Greek funerary inscription, "Artemidora, daughter of Harpokras, died untimely, aged 27. Farewell." A rough estimate of her age based on radiographic images of the mummy confirms that she was an adult who never reached an old age.

Egyptian Art

An exhibit at Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Met collection of ancient Egyptian art consists of approximately 30,000 objects of artistic, historical, and cultural importance, dating from about 300,000 BCE to the 4th century CE. A signifcant percentage of the collection is derived from the Museum's three decades of archaeological work in Egypt, initiated in 1906 in response to increasing interest in the culture of ancient Egypt.

Metropolitan Museum of Art