Fayyum: the oasis that Rome loved and the world forgot

In the ancient art galleries of the Louvre, the British Museum and the Metropolitan in New York, there are portraits that unsettle in a way that is difficult to name. Not because they are dark or violent: because they are too alive. Eyes that look directly back, expressions that carry a specific psychology, faces that seem to know they are being watched. These are the Fayyum portraits, painted on wood or linen using the encaustic technique — hot wax mixed with pigments — between the first and third centuries AD, and they may be the most disturbing objects in all of ancient art.

A synthesis that shouldn’t exist

The Fayyum portraits were born from an unprecedented cultural collision. The Greeks and Macedonians who arrived in Egypt with Alexander the Great brought with them the tradition of realistic portraiture on painted panels, a Hellenistic technique of very high quality that we barely know from elsewhere because organic supports rot. The Romans who succeeded them maintained the practice. But in Egypt, this Greek-Roman pictorial tradition collided with the Egyptian funerary practice of mummification.

The result was the funerary portrait: an oil or encaustic painting of the deceased, made during their lifetime or shortly after death, placed over the face of the mummy in place of the traditional gilded mask. The portrait identified the person individually — with name, profession, specific features — while the body was prepared according to Egyptian rite. This is a synthesis that could only have occurred in the Fayyum, in Ptolemaic-Roman Egypt, at a moment when three cultures overlapped on the same territory.

More than 900 portraits are known today. Most were found in the nineteenth century in the necropolises of Hawara and Antinoopolis. They are dispersed across 22 countries; Egypt itself holds fewer than fifty in the Egyptian Museum in Cairo and in the new Fayyum Museum.

The oasis

The Fayyum is not a sand oasis: it is a lake depression of 1,800 square kilometres southwest of Cairo, fed by a branch of the Nile called the Bahr Yusuf (the River of Joseph, in the Islamic tradition that associates it with the prophet). It is a landscape completely unlike the surrounding desert: palm trees, farms, artichoke and citrus fields, ducks in the canals, villages with painted mud-brick houses.

Lake Qarun, at the northern end of the oasis, is a saltwater lake 42 kilometres long that in Ptolemaic times was the largest artificial reservoir in the known world. The Ptolemies cut it back with dikes and canals to reclaim agricultural land from the lake; the process reduced its extent to less than a third of its original area. Today the lake has migratory birds in winter (flamingos, ducks, herons), a fishing village on its shore and a highway that skirts it with little traffic outside weekends.

Karanis and Wadi el-Hitan

North of Lake Qarun, the Greco-Roman city of Karanis (the present-day Kom Aushim) was one of the most prosperous cities in the Fayyum between the third century BC and the fifth century AD. Its ruins — two temples, streets, houses with walls still standing three or four metres high — are the best-preserved Roman urban remains in Egypt, though almost no travellers reach this far. The Karanis Museum, beside the ruins, has a collection of everyday life objects (pottery, textiles, documents) that gives a concrete picture of how ordinary people lived in Roman Egypt.

Wadi el-Hitan, the Valley of the Whales, is Egypt’s most extraordinary palaeontological site and one of the most important in the world. Some 80 kilometres southwest of the Fayyum, in open rock desert, there are hundreds of skeletons of ancient whales of the genera Basilosaurus and Dorudon: the Archaeoceti, ancestors of modern whales, which lived 37 to 40 million years ago when all of this desert was the floor of the ancient Tethys Sea. The skeletons lie in situ, emerging from the rock, with visible vestiges of hind legs that demonstrate the transition of cetaceans from land. UNESCO declared it a Natural Heritage Site in 2005.

Getting there

The Fayyum is 100 kilometres from Cairo and reachable by car in an hour and a half. Microbuses run from Ahmed Helmi station in Cairo to Fayyum city, but for Wadi el-Hitan and the more remote parts of the oasis you need a private car. The Fayyum is a weekend destination for Cairenes: better to visit midweek to avoid Friday traffic.

The complete Far Guides Egypt guide includes detailed Nile Valley routes, interactive maps and all the practical information you need to plan your independent trip.