ARKY 1000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 15: Lead Poisoning, John Torrington, Hands Tied
Document Summary
There are top down approaches, where you look at societies as a whole. There are also bottom up strategies, in which you observe individuals. The treatment of the dead is a very culturally specific type of thing. It is related to ethics, to some extent. Mummies give us a lot of evidence and a lot of bodies that we can study. In later ummies, there was a wrapped mummies, and then realistic portraits painted on the shrouds. The pictures are often of people when they were younger. It seems that at some point, in your life as an egyptian under roman rule, you would go and have a death mask painted. This was done when you thought you were the most beautiful or whatever, and then when you died, they would be attached to the sarcophricious. It is also possible that the artists would work back from what the people looked like when they died, but this is less accepted.
