Funerary Mask as a Powerful Symbol of Political, Social and Religious Power

Funerary masks are a trans-cultural phenomenon that involves, in different ways and at different times, the whole ancient Mediterranean due to their particular power to showcase individuality, as concentrated in the face and head. Reproducing the fundamental elements of the human face, the mask alters and enhances the emotions deriving from facial expressions, but it also has the power to cancel the human face and reveal a new reality. This paper will deal mainly with golden face masks, mouthpieces, and other metal foils that covered the face of the deceased in necropolises in the northern Aegean. Nearly one millennium after the famous examples of Mycenae, golden and gilded silver funerary masks were again used in burials, placed on the faces of individuals of high social rank. Cross-examining the various archaeological and sociocultural contexts, typological characteristics, iconographic and decorative patterns, it will be shown that these artefacts had a powerful language, embedded with a specific eschatological meaning. Indeed, objects do not have a single value and have complex relationships with individual and collective representations, their uses correspond to multiple and changing functions according to spatial associations. Eventually, I will argue that despite the result of a symbolic construction, these archaic golden foils possessed a concrete capacity for action: pertaining to a personal and public domain at the same time, they have performed multiple functions, not only suggesting a desire for ethnic and/or social belonging, but affirming social, economic and political hierarchies, both at a regional and interregional level.