People have asked me what my fascination is with Coptic Egyptian era funerary practices. It is that people tend to forget that Egypt is more than the Tomb of King Tut and the great pyramids.  There was a time when it was a meld of Hellenistic and Egyptian funerary practices  and art. To me it is fascination how   Egypt adapted to the new comers and they in turn became less Greek. 

I am always fascinated with  how Greeks who came with Alexander the Great and never left. The Ptolemaic dynasty ended with the fall of Cleopatra , the Romans no longer wanted a puppet ruler.  Rome established it's self in Egypt , with its fertile fields of grain , as a providence and made appointed governors to rule. It was in this new era that the last ,of the connective tissue so to speak , was worn thin and broke  with Christianity . The gods, the Ka needing to return to the mortal shell of a person were set aside gradually, with Christian and  pagan tombs showing no difference at first. Then as fewer and fewer people could read the hieroglyphics, the priests of the old gods passed on, the traditions lost their meaning  , only limping along in a few outlying desert communities and a few monasteries. 

The art of the funerary shrouds and mummy portraits are what I truly love and look forward to making.

Sources :

Andrew Hayward, Katie Hayward, Matthew Swanson. 2014. History, Culture, and Analysis of the Fayum Mummy Portraits. phd Thesis, Lansing: University of Michigan press

Landvatter, Thomas Peter. 2013. IDENTITY, BURIAL PRACTICE, AND SOCIAL CHANGE IN PTOLEMAIC EGYPT. Lansing: University of Michigan.