Deep below the earth, the workers reached the pebbled floor of a grave three thousand years old. They had begun digging underneath carved stones that depicted heroic deeds. The stones had marked deep shafts cut into the rock; in some cases, workers had to dig down 15 feet before they found the artifacts they were looking for.
After painstaking labor, they finally found the tombs of the elites of the bronze age city of Mycenae. Laying at the bottom of these graves were nineteen bodies that had been buried with astonishing treasure — beads, glass, silver and bronze vessels, pottery, and ornate, decorated blades.
But what really caught the excavators’ eye was all the gold, much of which had been hammered into very thin sheets by ancient craftsmen. There were all sorts of gold ornaments around the cremated bodies, but none more distinctive than the masks that had covered the faces of some of the men for millennia.
Heinrich Schliemann, the wealthy businessman-turned-archaeologist who orchestrated this dig in 1876, looked upon the most elegant of the masks, on the most elaborately buried body, and declared: “I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon,” the legendary king who was central to the Iliad and other Greek stories about the Trojan War.
It was almost certainly not Agamemnon — modern analysis has found that the mask was made at least 300 years later than the time of the Trojan War. Nevertheless, it likely represented the face of an important man. The stunning nature of the object and its association with one of the main characters of one of the world’s greatest epic poems made this one of the world’s most famous archaeological finds.
This would have been a stunning thing to come across deep underground amidst the charred remains of ancient bodies and sundry other treasures. You can see the places on the mask where the ears and maybe part of the beard would have been folded around the contours of the dead man’s face. Even though the mask today looks a little goofy because it’s flattened out so widely, in the grave it would have looked intimidating — the serene gaze of a well-groomed man (check out the little soul patch underneath his lip), comfortable with his power.
The “mask of Agamemnon” was the most famous mask in the shaft graves of Mycenae, but it wasn’t the only one. The others were less refined than “Agamemnon” (because of this, some have speculated that Schliemann somehow planted it) but they’re clearly attempts to capture the distinctive faces of the people buried deep in these shafts:
I’m partial to this rounded one, which, like “Agamemnon,” smiles ever-so-slightly at us:
The gold masks from Mycenae are fascinating in part because they were so unusual in ancient Greece— Schliemann called death-masking a “rare and curious practice.” But a number of ancient cultures throughout the world did mask their dead.
There is some evidence of funerary masks in other parts of the Greco-Macedonian world, especially at the necropolis of Archontiko, near Pella. The necropolis there, dating to the 500s BCE, contained bodies buried in warrior’s garb. Some of them have thin gold masks, which are similar in material but very different in style to those found in Mycenae:
I like their half-formed nature; they evoke the shape of a human face without quite trying to replicate it:
The most famous ancient funerary masks are Egyptian. Important people were buried with impressive masks, often made of plaster or something like papier-mache, like this mask of an “overseer of builders,” dating to around 1400 BCE:
Many important masks were given a golden sheen, like this mask of the mother of one of Hatshepsut’s top officials:
Egyptians believed that the soul, which separated from the body at death, would have to recognize the body when it returned, so these masks were not just tributes to the deceased but an important tool to help them achieve the afterlife. The masks were unique from person to person but often showed an idealized version of the deceased, almost always with the same serene smile.
Some historians believe that the Mycenaeans, who were in contact with the Egyptians, may have adopted the practice of masking the dead with precious materials from the land of the pharaohs.
The practice of funerary masks lasted a long time in Egypt, well into the Roman period, although the materials and style changed quite a bit. By the Roman era, the masks were more realistic and varied, a combination of Egyptian beliefs and Roman artistic styles:
This one’s eyes, though not exactly aligned, are piercing:
And this one, charmingly amateurish, may be evidence that even people without the resources to hire skilled artists wanted to commemorate their loved ones with a mask:
But the practice of covering the faces of beloved dead people with some kind of mask is much older than even the Egyptians, and was much more widespread.
At one of the very first permanent human settlements, Jericho (in the Palestinian Territories of Israel), archaeologists discovered stunning burials from more than 9,000 years ago. The people of Jericho buried their dead below their houses. Sometimes they buried the entire body, but sometimes they just buried the heads of their loved ones. And, occasionally, they created masks to replace the faces of those they buried.
The process at Jericho doesn’t seem very loving or gentle in modern terms — people defleshed their loved ones’ skulls, filled the cavities, and plastered over the skulls in an apparent attempt to represent the dead person’s features.
This one had the lower jaw removed, and shells placed where the eyes used to be:
And this one is more complete:
Perhaps some of these practices influenced each other, as historians speculate may have happened between the Egyptians and the Mycenaeans. But there seems to be a common human impulse to mask the dead, because we find funerary masks in cultures far away from the Mediterranean world.
In the Americas, for example, many cultures masked their dead in a fascinating array of styles. We have this one, placed on the face of a ruler from northern Peru who died about 1000 years ago:
And this one dating to the last few centuries BCE, made, once again, of thin gold, from Colombia:
The great Mexican city of Teotihuacan buried some of its dead with masks; this one would have been tied on through the holes in the ears:
The Mayans buried the king of Palenque, Kinich Janaab Pakal, in the 600s CE under this stunning jade mask:
I saved maybe my favorite for last — this one’s from the Ica culture in Peru, dating to the 13th-15th century CE. I find that it’s kind of cute at first, but becomes more intimidating the longer I look at it:
Why did cultures around the world put such effort into crafting masks for their deceased, only to bury these beautiful objects, never to be seen again?
Some speculate that masks may have been used to ward off evil spirits or bad luck in the afterlife. Like the Egyptians, they may have believed that masks could help a roaming soul to rediscover the body from which it had been separated. Perhaps the masks were an expression of power and wealth — the ultimate ornament for an important person. Or maybe they were just a way to obscure the pitiless process of decomposition, to preserve the likeness of someone whose face would soon rot away.
Whatever their purpose, these masks give us a portrait of ancient grief. Each of them required precious resources and took long hours to make. They are, like many funeral traditions, wasteful and even a little silly. But they‘re wasteful because the bereaved are grasping for a way to adequately mourn those they’ve lost. Though we no longer mask our dead, we share that ancient impulse to honor those we’ve lost.
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