Sarcophagus portrait of an Egyptian woman, ca. 1000 BCE, Third Intermediate Period, Egypt at The Field Museum

 Looking through images I took of artifacts in Chicago's Field Museum way back in 2005, I saw this sensitive sarcophagus portrait of an Egyptian woman.  I had just begun photographing museum collections back then and had not yet developed my method of sequential identification information so I didn't have the full reference I like to provide whenever I feature a particular artifact.  The Field Museum also does not provide a convenient database of their collections on their website either so I had to do a bit more digging.  I used Google Images to try to locate similar images that might have more description and discovered that this portrait caused quite a stir back in 2009 after Michael Jackson's death because people thought it looked like a portrait of him.  An article referred to the piece as 3,000 years old which would place it in the early part of the Third Intermediate Period so I hope that is correct.  I found other sarcophagus images at the Field Museum mostly dated to the Ptolemaic period but none of them had the textured-looking wig. I guess the next time I visit my son in Chicago I'll need to return to the Field Museum and rephotograph their Egyptian gallery with full documentation.


Image: Sarcophagus portrait of an Egyptian woman, ca. 1000 BCE, Third Intermediate Period, Egypt, photographed at the Field Museum in Chicago, Illinois.


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