A Roman Shroud and its Demotic Inscriptions in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston CHRISTINA RIGGS AND MARTIN ANDREAS STADLER A Roman Period shroud in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston (accession no. 54.993; figs. 1-3) is an unusual example of funerary art from this era because of its Asyut provenance, its three Demotic in scriptions, and the style and iconography of its painted decoration, which includes both Egyptian scenes and a naturalistic portrait of the deceased woman. 1 This study considers the artistic and tex tual evidence of the shroud in order to explore its dating and its relationship to funerary art and practices in Roman Egypt. 2 Description and Provenance The upper portion of the shroud depicts the head, chest, and arms of a woman painted in the nat uralistic classical idiom, with her face turned slightly to her left. At the bottom of the shroud are her slender ankles and sandalclad feet, which lie parallel to each other and are portrayed as if viewed from a vantage point above. When the shroud was in place on the corpse, these painted feet probably rose at an angle away from the body due to the natural projection of human feet, and the artist has taken this into account in the design of the shroud. The central section of the shroud consists of two registerordered Egyptian scenes that func tion like a screen or covering to conceal the body of the dead woman. In contrast to the portrait above and the feet below, these scenes use Egyptian compositional forms and conceptual, rather than 1 H 1.905 cm, W 47.0 cm, as assembled. H of Fragment I, 27.0 cm. The shroud was purchased from the sale of antiquities belonging to the Cairo dealer Albert Eid and given to the Egyptian department as a gift from the Class (now School) of the Museum of Fine Arts during the chairmanship of Mrs. A. L. Devens. Bibliography: K. Parlasca and H. Seemann, Augenblicke. MumienpoiliHts und tgfptixckt Grabkunst am rbmischer V.eit (Frankfurt am Main, 1999), 228 (no. 137); S. D'Auria, P. Lacovara and C. H. Roehrig, Mummies and Magic. The Funerary Arts of Ancient Egypt (Boston, 1988), 204-5 (no. 154), entry by L. Corcoran; K. Parlasca, Ritratti di Mummie, Repertorio d'arte dell'Egitto greco-romano, Serie B, Vol. II (Rome, 1977), 66 (no. 392; mistak enly as from the "Ede" Collection), pi. 96, 3; C. C. Vermeule and M. Comstock, Greek and Roman Portraits 470 BC-AD 500, Bos ton: Museum of Fine Arts (1972; 2nd revised ed.), fig. 46; K. Parlasca, Mumienportrats und verwandte Denkmaler, Wiesbaden: Steiner (1966), 46 n. 198 (no. 4), 18687, 239 (no. 202), pi. 43,1; W. S. Smith, Ancient Egypt as Represented in the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, 4th ed. (Boston, 1960), 188 with fig. 127 (portrait only); C. Vermeule and M. Comstock, Greek and Roman Portraits 470 BC-AD 500, 1st ed. (Boston, 1959), fig. 45; Museum of Fine Arts, Boston, Annual Report 1954, 89. In what follows, Christina Riggs is responsible for the description and discussion of the shroud and its portrait and Martin Andreas Stadler for the edition of the Demotic texts. The authors are grateful to the Department of Ancient Art of the Mu seum of Fine Arts, Boston, for permission to publish the shroud, and in particular to Lawrence Berman for his assistance. We also thank B. Borg, R. R. R. Smith, and K.Th. Zauzich for their advice. 3 For the representation of angled or projecting feet on mummies and coffins of the Roman Period, compare the coffin of Teiiris (D. Kurth, Der Sarg der Teuris. Eine Studie zum Totenglauben im romerzeitlichen Agypten (Mainz, 1990)), a shroud from Middle Egypt (Parlasca and Seemann, Augenblicke, 9297, 31013 (no. 206, now Louvre E 32634)), and the mummy of Ar temidora, in Ancient Faces. Mummy Portraits from Roman Egypt, ed. S. Walker (New York, 2000), 13235 (no. 85) [hereafter An cient Faces (New York)]. 69 Originalveröffentlichung in: Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, Vol. XL (2003), S.69-87