Exodus Painting, five elements from a painted hanging depicting the Crossing of the Red Sea A.D. mid-2nd-mid-4th century Byzantine These five evocative paintings most compellingly evoke the moment when the traditional painting styles and themes of the Late Antique, Greco-Roman world expand to include Judeo-Christian themes. The realistically evoked bodies and expressive faces suggest Roman narratives that survive only in contemporary descriptions and on sarcophagi that have long lost their richly painted surfaces. The works were probably originally used in a burial in Egypt, where the images, as part of a large hanging, would have been an outermost layer of the burial wrappings. The surviving painted elements are from a depiction of the Crossing of the Red Sea as described in Exodus, especially verses 14:19 - 15:20. From the left, the figures are the head of the Angel of the Lord going behind the Israelites; a torso of an Israelite soldier; the Philistines astonished at the Israelite s