19 | Sensaos

These are the remains of Sensaos, a 16-year-old girl who, according to an inscription in her tomb, died on 15 July, 109 CE.

Her body is wrapped in linen crossing over her chest, abdomen and feet.

As you can see, the preserved body has a unique appearance.

Its bulkiness and rigidity are due to the large quantity of resin that was poured over the many layers of fabric that preserve Sensaos’s body.

What you see, however, is not how Sensaos was originally laid to rest.

A linen shroud was once strapped to her body, its exterior painted with her image.

It was placed in a coffin and laid to rest in a tomb in Thebes.

In 1820, the tomb was opened and the coffin of Sensaos was found, along with 13 other wooden coffins belonging to her relatives.

These include her brother Petronius, mother Cleopatra and her father Soter.

Based on the Greek texts found in the tomb, we know that Soter was an archon, a high-ranking local official, which tells us that Sensaos was part of an elite and influential family in Thebes.

Although the members of this family desired to be buried together for eternity, their bodies and coffins were removed from the tomb and separated, dispersed to museum collections across Europe.

At Leiden in the Netherlands, Sensaos’s body was examined and scanned in the 1990s.

X-rays revealed that she had been very healthy.While the reason for her death was not confirmed, the scans added insight on what was placed beneath the linen wrappings of her body.

Two eye plates are inserted into each eye socket and an amulet in the shape of a serpent is placed on one of her legs, possibly for protection on the journey to the afterlife.

The scans were also used to produce a 3D-reconstruction of SenSaos’s face.

The skull only offers the basic measurements of the head, including its shape, the width of the nose and the mouth and the position of the eyes and the ears.

Anything else is based on assumptions about the people of Egypt in the 1st Century CE and on modern biases.

In 1997, the National Museum of Antiquities team reconstructed the face with a light skin tone, though the population of Egypt has always been very diverse.

Sensaos’s family probably had multicultural origins.

Her mother was given a Nubian name, her grandfather a Roman name and her grandmother an Egyptian name.

Clearly, we cannot assume that Sensaos had a light skin tone.

So, the museum has created several facial reconstructions to convey the variety of possibilities of Sensaos’s appearance.

These emphasise that such reconstructions remain speculative.

They make us question whether we really need to know the colour of Sensaos’s skin or that of others in ancient Egypt.

Does it really add to our understanding or deep appreciation of their customs and culture?

Here, the reconstructions are included in this exhibition to remind us to view the human remains of the ancient Egyptians not as objects, but first and foremost as people.