Portrait and Mummified Remains of Demetrios
Description
Object Label: When the Romans ruled Egypt (30 B.C.E.–642 C.E.), some wealthy Greeks there were mummified. This mummy was made with expensive imported materials that show the wealth Demetrios commanded in life. It is wrapped in a linen shroud painted with red pigment made with lead imported from Spain. The mummy includes a Roman-style portrait of Demetrios painted on a wooden panel in the medium of encaustic, or wax plus pigment. (Compare it to the less costly portrait painted directly on Neferhotep’s shroud, nearby.) Artists added Egyptian divine symbols to the mummy shroud and the deceased’s name and age at death, recorded as fifty-nine years, all in gold leaf. A recent CT scan (or three-dimensional X-ray) of this mummy reveals that the individual suffered from gallstones during his life. [Text not currently in gallery] Caption: Portrait and Mummified Remains of Demetrios, 95–100 C.E.. Human remains, linen, gold, pigment, encaustic on wood panel, 18 3/8 × 14 × 76 in., 130 lb. (46.7 × 35.6 × 193 cm, 58.97kg). Brooklyn Museum, Charles Edwin Wilbour Fund, 11.600. (Photo: Brooklyn Museum)
AI image analysis GPT-4o-2024-08-06
Machine-generated from the object's image on May 2026. Not curatorial; treat deities, names, and signs below as the model's best reading, not authority.
An ancient artifact with a depiction of a figure and faded decorations.
The artifact features a faded depiction of a figure with extended arms, painted or gilded in a gold-like material on a reddish-brown surface. The figure appears to be part of an ancient Egyptian practice, possibly religious in context. The worn surface suggests it is an ancient relic with notable deterioration in its condition.
Cross-references (2)
- BKM-Accession 11.600 tier-2
- BKM-Object 3060 tier-2
About this record's data
- From the source institution — accession, description, dimensions, and dating are as catalogued by Brooklyn Museum — Egyptian, Classical, Ancient Near Eastern Art.
- AI-inferred — the image-analysis panel (deities, names, signs) is machine-generated and may be wrong.
- Approximate location — most map points are plotted at the site centroid, not the exact findspot.
- Inferred links — cross-references marked with a match method other than explicit-source-field were matched by us, not stated by the source.