Yes, he does indeed look very unusual. As you can see, Drandaki does cite a couple of parallels, suggesting that the scrolls are a reference to the Pauline epistles. But if it wasn’t for the inscription, I probably wouldn’t have guessed this identity!

Thank you for sharing this piece! The inscription on the side shown here identifies the figure as St Apa Stephanos, so St Paul must be on the other side. There is more information on the icon in this article: dx.doi.org/10.26247/aur...

Have you looked at Ricardo Caminos’s overview of 19th- and 20th-century methods in Egyptological epigraphy in this book? www.metmuseum.org/met-publicat... — it probably doesn’t mention eyebrow pencils, though!

I might be able to help with this (depending on precise timing, etc.)

Yes, though I wonder just how much that impacted the European discourse directly - I would be curious to hear your thoughts on this when you’ve had a chance to read the book. Internal European schisms such as the Reformation or the rise of the anthropocentric afterlife seem more influential.

The book deals with the early modern and 19th-century European discourse on interpreting ancient Egyptian mortuary religion, which ends up feeding directly into the modern (Egyptological and popular) understanding. This is the context in which I use the notion of “colonisation”.

Ah, I understand. I am using the language here to contrast with the conceptual colonisation of the ancient religion by Christian concepts and frameworks. I don’t think the call to return to the sources here aligns particularly with nationalist agendas, but thank you for pointing out this issue.

Thank you! Since the core issue of the discourse is ancient Egyptian ideas, “indigenous” is used here to designate sources and concepts from that context (as opposed both to ancient Greek or Roman and later European ones). “Indigenous and coeval” might have been more precise, if a little unwieldy.

Thank you!

Yes, it is not entirely by accident that Egyptian afterlife beliefs seem so oddly "Victorian"! The book is currently in press, but I wrote a preliminary paper that might be of interest (though I hadn't realized at the time just how deep historical root the ideas have): bit.ly/4acz5d3

But by the time the Book of the Dead entered the picture, there was already a deeply entrenched tradition of understanding Egyptian mortuary religion as focused on judgement with resulting rewards and punishments in the afterlife, based on creative readings of authors like Herodotus and Diodorus.