open, and neither eyelashes nor eyebrows are marked. The next and last mask is very well preserved, and shows us a bearded face. Here the nose is thin and long, running in a straight line from the forehead. The closed eyes are large, and the mouth also. The beard is well given and particularly the moustaches, the ends of which are turned up like two crescents. There is no doubt that all these masks were intended for portraits, and it seems they were only placed on the faces of men. They were probably made after death.[1] According to Professor Petrie the date of the three graves is about 1150 B.C.[2]
Though this closes the list of funeral masks in Europe, it is well to add that they have also been found in Siberia, Phoenicia, Nineveh,[3] Egypt, and Peru. Messrs Klementz and Adrianov found masks with burnt human and animal bones, copper and bone objects, in some tumuli near Minusinsk. They were made of plaster; and along with Mongoloid types with prominent cheekbones and small, narrow eyes were others with very regular European features. All the masks were the size of life and painted red with a colour that has
- ↑ Schliemann, Mycenæ and Tiryns, London, 1878.
- ↑ Journ. of Hellen. Studies, pp. 199-205 (1891).
- ↑ The two masks from Nineveh are of very thin gold leaf and of very poor workmanship. To judge from a coin of Maximinus, found near one of them, they belong to the fourth century A.D. A third gold mask, also of rude work, was found under the ruins of Halebi Chelebi, on the west side of the Euphrates, on the face of a female mummy. It is of equally late date (Benndorf, pp. 66, 67). Since this paper was read before the Society, I have found a notice of two masks from Phœnicia, which shows that the custom had struck root on purely Semitic soil. M. Reée Dussaud describes and figures a terra-cotta funeral mask from Tartus, ten hours' march north of Tripoli on the Syrian coast. It is in the same style as the figurines from the same district, classed by M. Heuzey under the title of pseudo-Assyrian, and placed by him a little earlier than the seventh century B.C. The mouth is closed, but the eyes are perforated with a round hole. M. Dussaud does not doubt that it is of Phœnician work anterior to any Greek influence. He also mentions that another mask of inferior workmanship, also from Phœnicia, is preserved in the Louvre. (Revue Archéologique, 3me serie, t. xxviii., Mai-Juin, 1896.)
