Mummy Portraits Inclusion In The Mummification Process

“Any portrait will have conformed to ideals that were current at the time it was produced and that contributed to, or controlled how the image would be read by its audience. In part because of these shared ideals, contemporaneous portraits give an impression of sameness when seen alongside each other, and workshops might well have maintained a stock of sculpture or paintings that artists could adjust for salient physical features and costume details as required.” (Riggs, Christina).
The mummy portraits’ inclusion in the mummification process was just one part of a very specific set of rituals and procedures in preparing the dead for the afterlife. The art found in old mummy coffins and ancient Egyptian tombs was never intended to be seen by

and inscribed on funerary papyri. They were included in burials to provide instruction to the deceased for the negotiation of the difficult path through the netherworld… The complete version contained about 200

These registers separate the scene as well as provide ground lines for the figures. Scenes without registers are unusual and were generally only used to specifically evoke chaos; battle and hunting scenes will often show the prey or foreign armies without groundlines. Registers were also used to convey information about the scenes—the higher up in the scene, the higher the status; overlapping figures imply that the ones underneath are further away, as are those elements that are higher within the register.
Hierarchy of scale
Difference in scale was the most commonly used method for conveying hierarchy—the larger the scale of the figures, the more important they were. Kings were often shown at the same scale as deities, but both are shown larger than the elite and far larger than the average Egyptian.
Text and image
Text accompanied almost all images. In statuary, identifying text will appear on the back pillar or base, and relief usually has captions or longer texts that complete and elaborate on the scenes. Hieroglyphs were often rendered as tiny works of art in themselves, even though these small pictures do not always stand for what they depict; many are instead phonetic sounds. Some, however, are logographic, meaning they stand for an object or