Though frankly, we're rather more interested in certain other modern representations of Egyptian female royalty.
Generally we at ArchaeoBlog dislike the numerous archaeology-related jokes which we have all heard roughly twelve thousand times ("I'll date any old thing" excepted). However, when it suits our mission of enlightening you, our loyal readers, on various aspects of prehistory, we will happily stoop to making dumb jokes to get your attention.
The image above (um, the first one) is that of the mummy of Tiye, wife of Amenhotep III in the 18th Dynasty. The New Kingdom is where we find most of our classic images of mummies and in some ways it could be regarded as the height of the art of Egyptian mummification. Contrary to popular belief, they weren't always very good at it. For a review of the history of Egyptian mummification, start here.
A somewhat neglected period of Egyptian mummification is the later Greek and Roman periods. From that time we get a number of quite interesting mummies, notably from the Fayum Depression, where their general name comes from, the Fayum Mummies. These are interesting largely because of the portraits that grace their outside. Frankly, the image of Tiye above isn't terribly. . .errr. . .attractive, so here is something a bit more appealing from a Fayum mummy:
The images were meant to capture a life-like (or at least a suitably life-like) appearance for posterity. These are not actual death portraits; many of them may have been portraits painted early in life and subsequently placed with the deceased. Forensic analysis of several mummies indicates quite clearly that the deceased was quite aged at death while the portraits were of much younger individuals.
Also contra to the usual Egyptian tradition, the mummies were not necessarily buried soon after death. Petrie, for example, hypothesized that they (the mummies) had been displayed for some time before burial:
"Thus, every sign shows that the mummies, both with and without portraits, had stood exposed for a long time before burial. The conclusion we may draw is that they were kept in the atrium of the house. . . They were kept in the house so long as there was any interest felt in them, perhaps for a generation or two. Then when the persons had passed out of memory, and when the mummies had become soiled and broken, they were sent off to the cemetery, often as many as half a dozen at once"
And in fact this interpretation has contemprary textual support. Diodorus:
"Those who have private sepulchres lay the body in a vault reserved for it, but those who possess none construct a new chamber in their own home, and stand the coffin upright against the firmest wall."
Occasionally, we also get some information as to the occupation of the mummy in life:
Her portrait bears the inscription "Hermione, Grammatike" indicating she was a teacher. She was a very delicate woman, fully like the representation here and died in her late teens or early twenties.
These mummies represented a break from Egyptian tradition. Even though it was vitally important to remember someone's name during most of Egyptian history, it wasn't all that important to remember what they looked like. Everyone has noticed that in Egyptian sculpture and painting, the figures look a lot alike over the entire 3,000 year history. It would be incorrect to say that there was NO individuality in Egyptian portraiture. Those who specialize in it can readily identify what time period certain figures came from, and they can also often identify which king was being represented in any given portrait. So there were some traits in the Egyptian representation of people that gave it a certain individuality. On the other hand, just because the statues of certain individuals LOOK alike doesn't necessarily mean the statues look LIKE them. It may just be they have a certain set of stylistic traits associated with that person or the way that person wanted to be represented.
It is also true that in many cases, they seem to have tried to capture an individual realistically.
Also, Egyptian portraiture – at least the 2-D variety – held that figures were never to be drawn face-on, they were always in profile.
Nevertheless, this didn't come anywhere near, in most cases, truly realistic reproductions of a person. In the Greek and Roman world, this was entirely different. Beginning with Apelles in the 5th century BC what is called the 'Greek Naturalistic' school developed in which a sort of photographic realism was the goal of portraiture. The intent was to show that a particular piece of art was not only supposed to represent an individual, but also to look like that individual. In the Fayum mummies we see this melding of the Greek and Egyptian traditions perfectly.
Nevertheless, the actual mummies from these late periods show little concern for the mummification process itself. While the coffins and wrapping are artistic masterpieces, the mummies themselves often are little more than bags of bones. Often, little attempt was even made to dehydrate the body and it was just covered in resin and wrapped. Clearly, by this time the practice of mummification had taken a back seat to exterior decoration.
These Fayum Portraits as they are called are actually somewhat neglected. One of the reasons is because they really don't fit into any category of study. Egyptologists think they're mostly Greco-Roman art, so they're not much interested, but the art historians consider them Egyptian so they're not much interested either, and they're too early for Byzantine icons. So they've largely been an interesting curiosity.
On the other hand, they have a lot to tell us. For one thing, they are the most abundant examples of Greco-Roman naturalistic portraiture painting to survive. Most other places, conditions aren't conducive to preservation of these sorts of materials. The only other large sets of surviving examples are the wall paintings of Pompeii and Herculaeneum. The other important thing about them is that they represent real people, not gods or heroes or rulers. So we can see in some sense, what normal people looked like 2000 years ago.
More on the Fayum mummies can be found at Wikipedia.
An excellent book on the topic is The Mysterious Fayum Portraits by Euphrosyne Doxiadis.