Death Masks: Four Different Things We Call By One Name

The plastered skulls of Pre-Pottery Neolithic B Jericho, at Tell es-Sultan, are the earliest known three-dimensional treatment of a specific dead face. Real human skulls were covered with modelled plaster, painted, and fitted with shell eyes. Kathleen Kenyon excavated a cache of seven in 1953; our own research file says only that it happened in the 1950s. The British Museum's example, registration 1954,0215.1, is dated to roughly 8,500 to 9,300 years old.

Scholars have proposed that the plastered skulls are the earliest evidence for an organised ancestor cult, on the grounds that the modelled faces are deliberately individualised, which suggests a community maintaining a bond with specific named dead and therefore beliefs about the continuity of identity after death. That reading has itself been challenged. They may instead be ritual objects, trophies taken from enemies, or apotropaic devices meant to avert harm, none of which is commemorative portraiture. The counter-reading matters because it undercuts the tidy evolutionary story that puts Jericho at the head of a single line running all the way to Napoleon.

Two figures in our research file do not survive checking. It gives the mask's mass as 11.34 kg; the figure published across museum and reference sources is 10.23 kg, and 11.34 kg is exactly 25.0 pounds, which has the shape of a rounded back-conversion rather than a measurement. No primary or museum source stating any weight was reached for this article, so this page says about ten kilograms of gold and gives no precise figure. The file also dates the mask's discovery to 28 November 1925. Carter's excavation record has the innermost coffin lid raised and the mask first exposed on 28 OCTOBER 1925. The tomb itself was found on 4 November 1922; the mask came three years later, at the end of the unwrapping.

Nicholas Reeves has argued that the mask was not originally made for Tutankhamun at all, reading the cartouche as altered, with the present inscription cut over an earlier and longer Ankhkheperure Neferneferuaten oval, and pointing to the pierced ears as evidence of an original female owner. Published in the Bulletin of the Egyptological Seminar in 2015. This is a live minority argument and not consensus, and it is carried here at that strength, because it is the kind of claim that gets repeated as settled once it has been repeated a few times.

Our research file credits the Andean gold funerary masks to the Chimu. The masks it describes, sheet gold worked into a broad flat face with winged eyes and faced with red cinnabar, are the type object of the SICAN, also called Lambayeque, culture of Peru's north coast, roughly 750 to 1375 CE. The Metropolitan Museum's own record for its example reads Lambayeque (Sican). Separately, the Lord of Sipan, which the file also mentions, is a MOCHE burial of about AD 250, excavated in 1987 by Walter Alva at Huaca Rajada after police tipped him off that looters had struck the site. Three cultures, three corrections.

The Andean gold masks demonstrate independent invention of the funerary mask, with no plausible contact with the Mediterranean or Egyptian traditions. They belong squarely with Tutankhamun and Mycenae: hammered metal, worked to a cultural face rather than an individual one, laid over a wrapped body. Saying so in the same breath as the others is the point, because the temptation with three unconnected gold traditions is to treat the resemblance as evidence of contact rather than as evidence that gold, faces and burial are a combination several societies arrive at separately.

The mask cannot be Agamemnon's. It dates to roughly three hundred years before the traditional date of the Trojan War, and the historicity of Agamemnon is undemonstrated in any case. The name is a nineteenth-century label that stuck, and the museum itself uses known-as language. Our own file carries this correctly as a debunked item, which is worth saying because the file gets several other things about this object wrong.

Our research file puts the sentence I have gazed upon the face of Agamemnon in quotation marks, as Schliemann's own words. No telegram or writing of Schliemann's containing that sentence is known. It is a later invention and is recorded as apocryphal in the scholarly literature. What Schliemann did telegraph to the King of Greece announced that he had discovered the tombs which tradition, as reported by Pausanias, assigned to Agamemnon and his companions. That is a claim about tombs, made by a man who wanted it to be true, and it is not the quotation.

Oliver Dickinson argued in Hesperia in 2005 that the mask Schliemann himself associated with Agamemnon was probably not NM 624 at all. Schliemann's own contemporary wording describes a round-faced man, which fits a different mask from the same excavation. So the object the whole world calls the Mask of Agamemnon may not be the one its excavator meant by the name.

The authenticity of NM 624 has been intermittently disputed. William Calder raised the possibility of forgery, noting Schliemann's documented appetite for self-mythologising, and David Traill catalogued stylistic anomalies suggesting later intervention, in particular that this mask alone among the group has facial hair and ears cut free of the body of the mask. The dispute is not settled and the mask is not generally regarded as a forgery; Dickinson, in the same paper that questions the identification, argues that the practical difficulty of carrying out the alleged forgery counts strongly against it. Two separate questions, and only the first one is close to answered: it is not Agamemnon, and it is probably genuine.

Our research file says that CT and X-ray work has confirmed the portraits were painted during the subject's lifetime and attached to the wrappings after death, and files it as a Tier 1 key finding. It has not confirmed that, and the evidence points the other way. Where skeletal age at death has been compared with the age depicted, the two broadly agree, which points toward a portrait made at or near death rather than years earlier. The best-documented single case is a wholly wrapped Romano-Egyptian infant mummy in Munich, examined by CT and published in 2020. The correction matters because the lifetime-portrait version makes the Fayum panels sound like framed pictures that happened to be reused, and the evidence suggests something closer to a commission made when someone died.

Roman Egypt also produced moulded plaster and stucco mummy masks, a separate tradition running alongside the painted panels: a three-dimensional face modelled in plaster, often painted and gilded, laid over the head of the wrapped body. This matters for the scheme on this page because it is the one Egyptian object in the family that is genuinely three-dimensional and genuinely laid over a face, and it is still not a cast. It was modelled, not moulded from anybody. Our own file does not mention this tradition at all, which means a reader working from the file would meet only the flat paintings and the royal gold and never learn that the obvious middle case existed.

One Romano-Egyptian mummy portrait subjected to combined material analysis and radiocarbon dating returned a date later than the accepted window: its canvas fragment calibrated to 435 to 570 CE at 68 percent probability, which the authors read as a portrait made in the fifth to sixth century, roughly two centuries after the production period previously assigned to the corpus. This is a single object and it is carried here as a single object. It is not evidence that the Fayum dating is wrong; it is evidence that the practice may have a longer tail than the standard window allows.

Polybius, writing in the second century BCE, describes the Roman practice in Book 6 of the Histories. The image of the departed is placed in the most conspicuous position in the house, enclosed in a wooden shrine, and it is a mask reproducing with remarkable fidelity both the features and complexion of the deceased. At later family funerals the masks are worn by men chosen for their physical resemblance to the dead, dressed in the office the dead man held. No Roman wax imago survives. Everything known about them comes from literary testimony, chiefly Polybius and the elder Pliny, together with law, epigraphy, coins and a small number of artistic representations.

Our research file states that the imagines were wax masks moulded from the faces of deceased family members. The ancient sources do not say that. Polybius describes fidelity of likeness, not method and not timing, and fidelity is exactly what you would expect a Roman writer to praise whether the cast was taken before death or after. Toynbee's standing point is that neither Polybius nor Pliny supports treating these as death masks proper; Valerie Hope holds that a lifetime casting is more likely while allowing that the question is open. The weight of scholarship favours casting in life, which would move the imagines out of this article's subject entirely, and that is worth saying plainly rather than keeping them in the story because they are the most famous Roman thing in it.

The story is that the face belongs to an unidentified young woman pulled from the Seine in the late 1880s, probably a suicide, whose beauty moved a morgue attendant to have a cast made. None of that is established. Our own file's counter-arguments section says the narrative may be partly mythologised, that historians doubt the suicide story, and that the mask may have been cast from a living model, which would move it out of this article's strict category altogether. The honest position is that the most famous death mask in the world may not be a death mask, and that nobody can say whose face it is.

One thing about her is not legend. The Norwegian toymaker Asmund Laerdal, whose firm worked in soft plastics, collaborated with the anaesthesiologist Peter Safar, who pioneered modern resuscitation, to build a realistic training manikin, and took its face from the L'Inconnue mask, which he had seen hanging in his wife's family's home. The prototype appeared at the end of the 1950s. Resusci Anne has since been the face that millions of people have practised breathing into. Whoever she was, and whether or not she was ever dead when the cast was taken, her face is the one most often used to teach people how to keep someone alive.

Through the nineteenth century, casting the faces of executed prisoners was routine in Britain, Australia, France, Italy and Scotland, and the casts went into police archives, medical museums and the cabinets of phrenologists, who believed that comparing the heads of criminals would establish the existence of a criminal type. Life casting had emerged in the late eighteenth century partly in response to phrenology, because plaster gave the exact head shapes the theory required. This is by volume the largest body of European face casts, the science behind it is discredited, and our own research file does not mention it at all. Leaving it out is what makes the European section of this story read as a gallery of great men.

Plaster face casts taken from colonised peoples are a live repatriation issue, and the scholarship is specific about why rather than gestural. Casts were made under unequal power relations; the process was physically invasive and intimate and in conflict with cultural custom, and consent cannot be assumed. One collector, Finsch, recorded that the casting caused him more than enough trouble and difficulty, and wondered how he had made people willing to submit to it, which is a sentence that answers its own question. Two peer-reviewed treatments are cited on this page, and both are about the ethics of the casts specifically rather than about museum ethics in general.

The ethics of displaying death masks and human remains in museums is contested, and indigenous communities, descendant populations and postcolonial scholars argue that many funerary objects were acquired through colonial violence and should be returned. This page names holding institutions throughout, and it should be read with the qualifier attached rather than as a neutral inventory. Note in particular that a Jericho plastered skull is not a representation of a person: it is a person's skull, with plaster on it, in a museum case.

The claim that death masks possess supernatural properties, or capture the soul of the deceased, is refused. The psychological and cultural significance of the practice is real and substantial; the attribution of metaphysical properties to the physical object is unsupported. This deserves saying without condescension, because the Egyptian and Sican objects were made by people who believed something close to it, and the refusal here is of the modern claim that the objects do something, not of the beliefs of the people who made them. Tutankhamun's mask was made to let a soul find a body. That is what it was for. It is not what it does.

The claim, implied by any humans-have-always-wanted-to-keep-a-face arc, that the Jericho skulls, the Egyptian and Mycenaean gold, the Roman imagines, the Fayum panels, the Sican masks, the European plaster casts and the phrenological casts of executed prisoners are all expressions of one impulse. They are not. They use different materials, different methods, different moments in the process of death, and they serve incompatible purposes: protection, identification, commemoration, sculptural reference, ancestral authority, and the classification of criminals. The resemblance is in the word we use for them.