It is rare that an artifact lets us put a face on antiquity, making a museum visitor feel that they are standing directly before a person from the remote past. While every object in the Penn Museum’s Eastern Mediterranean Gallery tells a story about the people who made, used, altered, or even destroyed or discarded it, the anthropoid coffin lids from Beth Shean are uniquely compelling because they seem capable of returning their viewer’s gaze.
In a case in the center of the gallery lies a single, complete sarcophagus, restored from fragments, much as it would have lain in situ in one of the rock-cut tomb chambers in Beth Shean’s Northern Cemetery when it was first interred (between 1200 and 1000 BCE). It is a great hollow cylinder with a domed top, large enough to contain a human body. Some 50 such sarcophagi were excavated at Beth Shean between 1922 and 1931, and more examples from around the same period have also been uncovered at sites in northern Israel, the Negev, and Gaza. The concept of burying the dead in this type of coffin would have arrived in Canaan from Egypt, where mummies had been buried in anthropoid sarcophagi since the Middle Kingdom (ca. 2040–1650 BCE).
Whereas Egyptian coffins were typically wood or stone, those found at Beth Shean are ceramic. It would have taken immense skill and ingenuity for local artisans to adapt the anthropoid coffin form to this new medium. The potters certainly would have been working on a scale they had never attempted in their usual production, even for a large handmade pithos like the one displayed at one of the gallery entrances. The sarcophagi were too large for firing in conventional kilns, and the variable temperatures of the open fires in which they were baked are likely responsible for the uneven surface coloration. Some examples began to show cracks after firing and had to be repaired with plaster or string bindings.
To create the overall form of the coffin, the potters built up walls of clay coils, which they then smoothed with their fingers. Next, they cut holes into the clay body: one in the base, sometimes three more in the back to let out fluids from the body as it decayed, and one in the top to make a lid.
Onto the lids the potters then applied clay faces, arms, and hands. The arms of the restored coffin in the gallery are crossed in the typical pose of Egyptian mummies, but the long, splayed fingers are distinctive. The face was rendered with high cheekbones, thin lips, and long, lanceolate eyes. This particular lid exemplifies what the first publications of the Beth Shean sarcophagi called the “naturalistic style”: the facial features are subtly modeled, cohesive, and organic, notwithstanding a certain degree of abstraction.
On the other side of the case, the visitor encounters a wall of six disembodied faces, lids for which the rest of the sarcophagi could not be completely restored. On the left are four more “naturalistic” faces, exhibiting noticeable variants in the presence/absence of beards and the rendering of the ears and eyes, but using the same technique of modeling as the lid of the restored example.
Contrast these with the two lids on the right side, where we find an entirely different mode of rendering the face. In these examples, the features are not so gently and seamlessly combined into a face at the center of the lid. Instead, long, thin coils of clay denote the sharp contours of the eyes, the eyebrows, the ears, and the protruding nose. The ridge-like lines they form are arrayed all over the lid’s surface, creating a wide, flat, jack-o’-lantern-like visage. These lids’ unnaturalistic distortions of the face earned them the moniker of the “grotesque style.” The terms “naturalistic” and “grotesque” have stuck in the current scholarship, although they require the caveat that today, at least, they are intended as merely descriptive and do not imply a value judgment that the naturalistic was the better of the two.
Why are two markedly different artistic styles both represented in the Beth Shean sarcophagi? Some scholars have proposed that the styles reflect change over time or different ethnic identities of the makers or occupants of the coffins. In particular, the headdresses of the “grotesque” lids look very similar to those worn by figures in certain New Kingdom Egyptian reliefs, which represent groups of migrants from the Aegean region whom the Egyptians called “Sea Peoples.” According to the Egyptians, these Sea Peoples tried to attack Egypt, but the pharaoh Rameses III (1187–1156 BCE) defeated them and resettled them along the Eastern Mediterranean coast. Might the “grotesque style” coffins then be the burials of Sea Peoples stationed as mercenaries in the Egyptian garrison at Beth Shean? While conclusive evidence still eludes us, the parallels in the Egyptian reliefs and the reported presence of Sea Peoples in Egyptian imperial outposts point toward that identification.
The “naturalistic” coffins also invite questions over the identities of their occupants. The hairstyles, folded arms, and beards of their lids are all reminiscent of Egyptian coffins, which could suggest that personnel of Egyptian origin stationed in the garrison commissioned them as a way of approximating the burial customs of their native land. But the Beth Shean coffins show important differences from those of Egypt. For one thing, the dead at Beth Shean were not mummified but left to decompose inside the coffins. For another, grave goods were often placed within the terracotta sarcophagi, whereas Egyptian burials typically kept such materials in the tomb chambers outside the coffins. Because Egyptian mortuary customs were so firmly codified, especially with regard to the preservation of the individual, these deviations hint that the occupants of the Beth Shean tombs were not native Egyptians trying to replicate the mode of burial they knew, but rather local Canaanites who had been incorporated into the Egyptian imperial administration, emulating and adapting Egyptian practices for the prestige that came from their association with the ruling elite. The Egyptian-born officials who served at Beth Shean may have preferred to be returned home for burial rather than spend eternity in a foreign land.
The likenesses on the coffin lids, even of the “naturalistic” type, tend to be heavily schematized, but they have just enough particularizing features to make us think that we are looking at specific individuals (a pointed chin here, a pinched mouth there, a distinctive hairstyle, round cheeks, heavy brows, and so on). Are we wrong to view them as mimetic portraits in this way? We do not know which features, if any, were modeled after individual faces and which were mere artistic idiosyncrasies, or whether some of these characteristics had a symbolic value beyond their reference to real people. Hairstyles, for instance, might signify social positions or connect the deceased with a divinity, like the Egyptian-style wigs and Osiris beards visible on some of the lids from Beth Shean.
But even if the sense we might have that we are looking at true likenesses of ancient individuals may be illusory, we must admire the artists’ abilities to conjure the impression of a personal presence. And when one stands in the gallery in front of these faces from the past, it is hard not to imagine that their mouths could open at any moment and divulge their secrets.