ABSTRACT
Like the painted portraits, the gilded masks were excavated by W. M. Flinders Petrie in the cemeteries at Hawara. The masks were derived from pharaonic traditions of belief, in which the mask served as a substitute for the head of the deceased, endowing the individual with the attributes of deities and thereby assisting his or her passage to the afterlife; in many instances, the gilded face is surrounded by scenes representing protective deities, painted in registers on the lappets and at the sides and back of the head. The earliest masks are of men, masks of women with mostly very Romanised portrait features appearing in the mid-first century Ad. It is striking that few painted panel or shroud portraits of men appear to date before the reign of Vespasian, and it may be the case that in the early Empire most men were commemorated with masks.
