When visiting the area of Bahriya oasis with my groups and our wonderful spiritual christian egyptian guide, Ibrahim,enthusiastically leads us to the ancient cemetry sites, delves into cave like tombs to find, mummies wrapped in just linen, possible mercenaries of Alexander the great in the area, we have entered an area of Egypt that has the strongest connections where history is woven and blends with the history of the Ancient Greek and Roman rules of Egypt.
Alexandra the great had a temple built here, and it became a thriving town for the wine trade,that brought alot of wealth to the area, allowing merchants to have tombs built for themselves, and it also developed an extensive Roman cemetry. It is this area in which the golden mummies were found.What makes these Greco-Roman mummies and their death masks so extraordinary,is that the Romans blended their beliefs with the ancient egyptian practice of preserving the bodies for the afterlife,but they painted their mummy faces to show a realistic impression of the face of the deceased, which offers a feeling of actually 'knowing' the deceased.
The unusual faces or death masks of Bahariya offered us an impression of people with individual characters, their pasts an promise of an afterlife. The images are personalised, sometimes in touching ways. One female mummy that we saw in the museum has beautiful eyes that are accentuated by eyeliner, and it reminded me of a saying of my own grandmothers, 'always dress to impress as you never know what might happen to you, this young woman obviously wanted to be seen at her best in the afterlife.
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