Tejidos para la divina muerte. Los sudarios pintados con retrato y escenas religiosas del Egipto romano

The study of the funerary beliefs of Egyptian tradition in times of Roman domination has been the main subject of this doctoral thesis. In ancient Egypt, as in other ancient and modern cultures, the deceased were granted with objects that guaranteed a pleasant unearthly existence. Grave goods that involve significant evidence of personal identity of the deceased and their society, especially with regard to their religiosity. In order to learn more about these funerary beliefs and practices, those materials that could provide more information about it, in quantitative and qualitative terms, were chosen: shrouds painted with central realistic or idealized portraits accompanied by religious scenes and motifs related to the successful passage of the deceased to the Afterlife. So we took into account as far as possible, the specific context of each of the objects studied here in order to address the issue from a regional, chronological and, ultimately, cultural point of view. Throughout this work, we have been able to confirm the existence of regional beliefs and artistic practices under the grand umbrella of Egyptian religion, which has allowed us to give the thesis a chronological focus that we believe has demonstrated the survival and change in belief and art that took place, especially between the first and third centuries AD. We hope that the religious collection contextualized and studied here may help pave the way for the large amount of work that remains to be carried out on Egyptian personal religiosity and its transformation as a result of contact with Roman culture. Among much of the work that remains to be done is research on the same period, but also we need studies that delve into the previous period: the thorough study and publication of unpublished materials such as coffins, painted Ptolemaic shrouds or vignettes from funerary papyri. These, together with the ongoing investigation of grave goods and tombs from the Late Period, will allow us to establish detailed chronological and geographical surveys of enduring and mutable aspects of Egyptian private faith which in turn will supplement the studies of texts, which at present are at a more advanced stage of development.