The beautiful Fayum Portraits and me dum

It's amazing how little I know. I think I'm reasonably well read but all the time I find I don't know the most basic things. I had never heard of a Segway until two weeks ago.

I was 45 before I learned where the human sinus is situated -- I'd always mentally placed it right at the end of the nasal cavity and didn't even know it was a quite large empty space (very dumb of me considering sinus is Latin for 'empty space' -- me dum). I thought it was a thing, like tonsils, not a hole the size of a bantam egg. In my case, it was no longer a void at all but a thing, a mass of polyps, hence the headaches.

The location and nature of the sinus was the explanation for 20 years of severe headaches I had endured (and which no doctor had ever diagnosed). Within minutes of being told by a specialist surgeon what the sinus was, I was placed at the head of his patient queue and in quick time I was under his knife -- and headache free for the first time since my youth. Knowledge is no substitute for wisdom but I take issue with people who say that you can have too much.

And until this morning I had never heard of the Fayum Mummy Portraits. I'd seen one or two of them and even used one in the Book of Days, but that was as far as it went; I didn't know there was a collection. And what a collection it is! Two-thousand-year-old portraits yet many with the look of modernism. It's great that Wikimedia Commons shows many of them.

Tagged: art, egypt, wikimedia