Recovering Papyri Fragments from the Wrappings of Mummy Masks

Cartonnage bath to separate out the used papyri from a mummy mask
Photo taken from Emily Teeter's Ancient Egypt (2003)

Prior to my post on the Symposium on the Theological Interpretation of Scripture, I wrote on the mummy masks that were on display at the Getta Villa (see this post). It just so happens that last year, mummy masks were all the rave because of the possibility that some Gospel of Mark fragments dated to the late 1st century A.D. were recovered from the cartonnage (an ancient version of paper mâché made of linnen or papyri strips with glue) of a mummy mask. The claim has stirred up quite a bit of controversy and intense discussion on the blogosphere because the said Mark fragments have yet to be published (the projected 2015 date will probably be missed). Here is a random sampling of scholars who all argue for a healthy dose of scepticism until evidence/data that can be examined by the academic community becomes available: Roberta Mazza, Peter Willliams, James Tabor, to name a few.
    The claims for authenticity, however, should not be ignored because we do have two credible New Testament scholars, highly respected, who insist that the fragments are genuine and it is only a matter of time before they will be published (Brill will publish the fragments as part of the Green Scholars Initiative: Papyri Series; Michael Holmes, Director of the Green Initiative, has released this (un)official statement on his blog). Both Professor of Craig Evans, formerly the Payzant Distinguished Professor of New Testament at Acadia Divinity College, who this past June 2015 recently accepted a new post at Houston Baptist University, and Professor Daniel Wallace of Dallas Theological Seminary and known textual-criticism expert, are eager to answer critics once the papyri have been published. Apparently a non-disclosure statement with the owners of the mummy mask from which the papyri were extracted keeps Evans and Wallace from saying any more. The hornet's nest was stirred when Evans, back in 2014, made this announcement during a lecture (see below): 

Almost immediately, the news media picked up on the announcement and posted articles from it and from an earlier press leak by Daniel Wallace during a debate with Bart Ehrman in 2012 (see Forbes, Live Science, The Smithsonian, The Washington Post, and the Christian Today). 
   I personally will simply wait until the Brill publication becomes available before making my own deliberation on the authenticity of the fragments. There is really nothing more anyone can do until they are published. But pedagogically, the whole process is a great segue to sharing with seminary students how some of our manuscripts and papyri fragments have fascinating stories of their own about their discovery. Aside from the incidental coincidence that mummy masks fit the October halloween theme, the anticipation concerning the Gospel of Mark fragments is a good way to talk about how papyri discoveries come from the oddest places: the garbage dumps of Egypt (think Oxyrhychus), on palimpsest (another form of recycled papyri), Christian monasteries (think Bodmer), or on the antiquities black market. 
    In the case of the mummy mask, with all the secrecy, I suspect that a private collector is involved (but this is only speculation). While we wait for Brill to publish the Green Scholars Initiative papyri series, below is a helpful video which outlines the process that some archaeologists / papyrologists used to protect the painted portrait of the mummy mask while still being able to extract the cartonnage and separate its layers to read the recycled papyri. Have fun! 

Video of Jaakko Frösén (University of Helsinki)

demonstrating how to extract the papyri from a mummy mask

without damaging the painted portrait

One more photo: Life Science has a nice article how renowned classicist Dirk Obbink discovered two poems of Sappho from the mummy cartonnage of a private collector. You can read the article (here). Below is the photo of the recovered papyrus scroll fragment from the cartonnage. Wow! It's amazing that it could be restored with such clarity.

Photo credit: livescience.com

Postscript 10/19/15: One of Roberta Mazza's students found this video on the mummy mask from which the Gospel of Mark fragments came (or at least, this was the mummy mask used on the powerpoint screen for the announcement). If this is indeed the mummy mask, and I'm no expert, it sure makes even me nervous how the mask and papyri was handled. Watching the video can be nerve-wracking as you see the masked and papyri handled by several people. I hope the Green Scholars Initiative is taking care of the papyri well, and the faster Brill publishes it, the better. MJL

Mummy Masks and Roman Egyptians

One of the best exhibits at the Getty Villa was the display of mummy masks from Roman Egypt. The use of portaits painted on the head of a mummy is a combination of Egyptian burial customs and Roman individualized portraiture traditions. Often wood panels are used for the portrait and later inserted into the mummy's linen wrappings. Pigments were suspended in bee's wax and brushes used to paint the face of the dead onto the panel. Sometimes a hardening agent like eggs yolk was applied. 
   Besides the excellent example of the mummy mask shown in my previous post, here are some of the other mummy portraits on display at the Villa (forgive some glares; I did my best to try to get a clean photo through the protective glass of the display):

Portrait of a Roman-Egyptian Man (AD 200-25)
Cropped hairstyle reflects the Severan era
Photo by Max Lee © 2015

Portrait of an Roman-Egyptian Woman  (AD 170-200)
Dress, jewelry, and hairstyle depict a matriarch of wealth
Photo by Max Lee © 2015

Portrait of a Roman Egyptian Man (AD 200-50)
holding a glass of wine and garland of flowers which
are typically associated with funeral rites
Photo by Max Lee © 2015

Rarely does one find a perfectly preserved mummy in antiquity, but the Getta Villa has one on display which shows nicely how the wood panel portraits like above were inserted in the wrappings of the mummy. Below is the mummy of the Roman Egyptian Herakleides (AD 50-100): 

Mummy Body of the Roman Egyptian Herakleides (AD 50-100)
Photo by Max Lee © 2015

Photo shows how the mummy portrait panel was inserted in the wrappings
and the body itself was decorated further with symbols of protection and rebirth
Photo by Max Lee © 2015

We are not exactly sure why the Egyptians created headmasks (often gold) which later evolved into the Roman practice of life-like portraits on wood panels inserted on top of the head coverings. But it may be that the spirit of the person was believed to be wandering around during the day and in order to return to its body at night, the portrait was there to help the human spirit recognize its own body.
     Also worth noting is how the name of the man was written in Greek just above the feet. It's hard to see but you can make out ΗΡΑΚΛΕ[ΙΔΗΣ] if you stare at the photo below:

The feet of the mummy body with the letters ΗΡΑΚΛΕ- - - - written in Greek
just above to the left. The missing letters are visible upon closer inspection
though hard to see in the above photo
Photo by Max Lee © 2015

I find the exhibit utterly fascinating for the example of cultural assimilation that has taken place among Egyptian religious practices. The portraits are ethnic Egyptians but these Egyptians are dressed like Romans! The names are spelled out in Greek. The ancient Mediterranean world was far more cosmopolitan than we might initially suspect, and the influence of Rome affected even the burial rites of the colonized population.
   But there is another reason why I wanted to see this exhibit. Sometimes, instead of linen, strips of papyri were used with glue to make the cartonnage, or the cardboard-like materials created from plastering the mummy wrappings, much like children who make crafts from paper-mâché. Sometimes, the papyri they use are recycled from written texts and scrolls. The trick, then, is how to peel away the layers of paper-mâché papyri from the mummy mask or body and recover the written texts they contain. For New Testament scholars, much ado has been made about the possibility of a Gospel of Mark fragment discovered in a mummy mask (yet to be verified by the way!). More on this in the next post. For now, enjoy the photos from an incredible exhibit at Getty.

Herculaneum: Where Particle Physics and Papyrology Meet

I love what I do. Just when you think nothing can surprise you any more, something always lights up your horizon in the world of the ancient history and biblical studies. NPR just released a fascinating radio story on a major breakthrough in papyrological studies: using a particle accelerator developed in France, papyrologists are beginning to read the text off of a fossilized papyrus scroll without having to open it. You can listen to the radio show here, and read more from the technical published article on which the show is based at Nature Communications. 

Photo of a rolled up, charred scroll uncovered from the Herculaneum
library which was buried under volcanic ash in AD 70
Photo credit: www.npr.org

   Since my research agenda involves the intersection between ancient philosophical discourse and Paul, and my next major monograph will be on Paul and the Epicureans (right after I'm done with my 1st one.... almost there by the way!), I have been reading the philosophical writings of Philodemus uncovered from the ancient library at Herculaneum in Italy for some time. The villa of Piso (Julius Caesar's father-in-law) near the seaport of Herculaneum, along with the entire city of Pompeii just 9 miles south, if you recall, was buried under volcanic ash when Mount Vesuvius erupted in AD 70. Hopefully some of you had a chance to see the exhibit of Pompeii when it circulated nationally in the States back in 2006. It was stunning! and my sons and I had a great learning experience when the exhibit was displayed at the Field Museum in Chicago. 
   To appreciate the NPR article, let me digress a bit to explain succinctly the process that archaeologists and papyrologists undertake to reconstruct an ancient text from papyri. When I work with the ancient texts, I almost always deal with the published form, like this example from Richard Janko's Philodemus: On Poems, Book 1 (The Asthetic Works 1:1; New York/Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), p. 260: 

Print edition: P Herc 460, Column 67, lines 1-10

The above critical, published text is reconstructed, with conjectures on what the text might be in brackets since there are gaps or unreadable sections in the original papyrus.
    But in order for me to read the above, some enterprising papyrologist had to do the hard work of unrolling a brittle, charred scroll. As soon as you unroll the scroll, it starts to fall apart and you are left with hundreds of fragments that need to be carefully put together with the other fragments in correct order, much like how a person has to solve a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle, but in this case, you might be missing many of the pieces, or some of the pieces are stuck together and you have to take them apart before finishing the puzzle. Here is the same text above but as a photo of its original fragment: 

Photo of P Herc 460, fragment 1

This piece, however, needs to be laid aside the other pieces to reconstruct the full text. Many times the texts are illegible and have to viewed under a multi-spectral, infra-red light in order to read the ink (click the link for a youtube video on the process). Without the infra-red light, it looks much more like a charred mess: 

Almost completely illegible charred Herc papyrus fragment
Photo Credit: The Friends of the Herculaneum Society

Fragments from an unrolled scroll put back together
Photo credit: www.npr.org

Often papyrologists double as artists and sketch their reconstructed texts in their notebooks. Here again is the same P Herc 460 fragment (highlighted in yellow) but hand-drawn and put to gether with other fragments:

P Herc 460, frag 1-4, redrawn by F. Casanova
(frag 1 is highlighted in yellow)

   What makes the NPR article, now, so exciting, is that with the particle accelerator and technique called "X-ray phase-contrast tomography," they can read the ink off the papyrus scroll without having to unroll it. This way, the rolled scroll is kept from potentially being destroyed by the unrolling process. The technique still needs further refinement but if all goes well, we might see previously unpublished scrolls accessible to the academy and public when their texts are reconstructed and made available in the print edition. I don't have the expertise to do any of the above, except to read the printed form of the texts. So I'll have to eagerly await along with everyone else what treasures can be unlocked when particle phyics and papyrology collide at Herculaneum!
   Want to watch a video demonstration of the process? See the youtube video demonstration below from the University of Kentucky lab team. Wow!