After Alexander's conquest, Egypt interwove with Greek and then Roman culture. Among the most moving products of this blend are the mummy portraits, found especially in the cemeteries of the Faiyum oasis. From the first century BCE to the third century CE, the face of the deceased was painted on a thin wooden panel, then placed among the wrappings over the head of the mummified body. Thus ancient Egypt's ritual of death and the Greco-Roman tradition of portraiture met in a single object.

What makes these portraits extraordinary is their realism. Many capture, with startling directness, the living gaze of a young woman, the wrinkles of a man, the large eyes of a child. To render light and volume the painters used heated coloured beeswax (encaustic) or egg tempera; the faces, with shading and bright highlight strokes, appear almost three-dimensional. Jewellery, hairstyles, and clothing document the fashion of the time.

These faces tell us not "what" they were but "who" they were. Where most ancient art shows idealised gods, rulers, and types, the Fayum portraits depict the individual — a particular, mortal human, whose name is usually lost. For this reason they are the earliest known direct ancestors of the Western portrait tradition; far earlier than the Renaissance road to the portrait of the individual, they waited, preserved in the dry desert air.

The purpose of a portrait here is not aesthetic but existential: to preserve the identity of the dead in the passage to the next world. Yet by an irony of time, it is precisely this ritual function that lets the faces of ordinary people who lived two thousand years ago still look into our eyes today.