Head and Chest From a Sarcophagus

These mummy covers represent the extremes of wealth and poverty in Roman Egypt. The professionally crafted, gilded, and inlaid mummy cartonnage represents a woman whose life and death were spent in luxury. In contrast, the hand-modeled and naively painted terracotta mask was perhaps fashioned by the deceased herself or a family member. Though both covers protected the mummy adequately, the materials used demonstrate how poorer members of society could also provide, inexpensively, the objects necessary to reach the next world.