I have not found any information about the figures themselves, but I have found a similar work of art that depicts the same scene and contains almost identical depictions of Osiris (the crowned, mummified man), a deceased Greek-looking man (who is also a Roman citizen according to his toga; thanks /u/Tiako!), and Anbuis (the jackal headed god of the afterlife). The painting I linked to is dated around 130 B.C.E. during the period of Hellenistic control over Egypt called the Ptolemaic Kingdom. And because the two paintings have similar figures, style, and scenes I think we could safely infer that your painting is from the same period.

Edit: Ok, I found another website with your exact painting.

It's inconclusive of what they actually are, although the author guesses that they represent the souls of the damned.

Edit Pt. 2: Ok, I found another painting similar to the previous paintings on the Louvre website that also contains your figures, unfortunately there's no mention of the figures.

I'd like to know more about the painting, if you have the information. Can you tell us anything about the artist, location it was found, approximate date? It looks like late Imperial Roman or Byzantine, but if you can provide some details, that might be helpful. :)

Copying /u/stinky_vaj's (exquisite username) answer on the other thread here to all intents and useful purposes.

This is a funerary hanging. It's depicting a journey to the afterlife. The gods are Anubis and Osiris. I can't offer an explanation of the little figures, but maybe this will help someone else research it. (You can see little figures in this larger version of the Louvre image as well.)

Edit: Page 171 of this book says the tiny black figures are souls.

Osiris, the dead man, and Anubis stand on a Nile skiff. The smaller figures on either side of the man's head are comparable to those on shroud 69 in Fig. 81. The deceased holds a hes-vase out to Osiris, as if pouring a libation, and next to Osiris' head, an Egyptian peasant lifts a shaduf from which skeletal 'souls' try to drink.

• The Beautiful Burial in Roman Egypt : Art, Identity, and Funerary Religion

/r/arthistory x-post for those who want to watch it also:

http://www.reddit.com/r/ArtHistory/comments/24s4at/who_are_these_weird_stick_figures_in_this/

Lovely painting! I will admit that I am not familiar with it directly, but I do have familiarity with Roman paintings in general and I believe I can answer you question.

Roman painting had a tendency to become somewhat "meta". That is, it is very common to find art portrayed with art. This is most well known in the so-called "forth style" Pompeian wall painting, in which a wall would be painted to appear as though there are discrete paintings within it. This has led some to think of it as an imitation portrait gallery, and while I do not necessarily agree with many of the social implications drawn from that (ie, the moderately wealthy imitating the portrait halls of the extremely wealthy), it is a definitely striking style. In this case, it looks to me as though the background of this painting has been painted to look as though the main figure is standing in front of a painted backdrop. To me, it appears that the backdrop is meant to be a tapestry, although that could just be a quirk of the photograph.

Which is all fair enough, so to cut to the chase my guess is that the figures are supposed to represent agricultural laborers in the field. Egyptian painting has a long history of depicting scenes from daily life. The figure in the middle underneath his legs, for example, could be plowing or something similar. They are abstracted as stick figures, perhaps because the artist was not comfortable working on so small a scale, or perhaps because it didn't really matter, we all get the gist and more fully formed figures would detract from the scene. I feel it is a pretty close match.

Now of course, I am looking for Egyptian precedents rather than Roman because the iconography of the scene is so very Egyptian, and I think it is better to bias that. But agricultural scenes are not uncommon in Roman art, and given the importance of agriculture to Egypt I see it is quite appropriate. I am not familiar with any such scenes appearing in painting, but our corpus of painting is small and extremely skewed, and my knowledge is very heavily based on Pompeian painting, so it might not be uncommon in Egypt.

Alternatively, aliens.

Shabti dolls, most likely.

http://www.ancient.eu.com/article/119/

Why is graffiti (ie something that was painted in after the fact) not a possibility? If it was in every or even most Roman era funerary paintings it becomes more intriguing

They really look like the living version of Ushabtis. These are funery figuerines. However, according to ancient egyptian mythology they act a substitutes for the deceased, should he/she be called upon to do manual labor in the afterlife. In this painting, it is obvious that the main figure is in the after-life since he is in the presence of Anubis.

There was a large movement of Egyptian art styles that made it's way through the Roman Empire and for the most part through the upper class. As Rome conquered Egypt you had a very alien and interesting cultural heritage considering what the Romans would have been used to, and so it was fashionable for some of the wealthier peoples to buy sculptures and original art from Egypt, or in a lot of cases, make a cheap knock off of it. At the same time, Roman culture was introduced to Egypt, so when you have Roman people living in Egypt, you have a blending of art styles there, as in images like the OP posted. I'll give some examples. A Roman mummy:

Some pictures I took with my phone

I've posted an answer considering Roman Art in Egypt already, so it'll be easy to pull image references for that from that answer for me. Concerning my answer as to what those figures are, I first took the side of /u/dopplerdog, who guessed at them being ushabti figures, and I really tried my best to see if I could support his answer, but I don't think I can do it. There is nothing I can find like this in any sort of ancient Egyptian art, when they drew ushabti figures they were more or less drawn in their inanimate form, according to my evidence.

I'm posting this answer to help the search for a better answer, basically said we need to look at it from the Roman perspective. I already described Roman and Greek art, and so I'm thinking a scholar of the Romans or Greeks is something we need most right now, because it seems to simply be something they made up themselves, it could be a poor attempt at imitating Egyptian art, however the fact that there have been multiple examples provided leads me to believe this could go back to something cultural, maybe a misinterpretation of Egyptian art/beliefs. In a lot of cases considering Roman-Egyptian art, as in the Faiyum paintings, somebody that knows enough about Egypt can discern the intention of the art piece and what each piece of Egyptian symbolism is supposed to represent, because usually it's copied straight from Egyptian art or still apparent. In this case, the work of art is much more Roman than it is Egyptian.

The possibility of it being an ushabti figure is one that seems very logical, and it could be very possible that this is simply a Roman or Greek interpretation of an ushabti, helping out its master. I'll post some examples of Egyptian scenes similar to the ones depicted by these paintings. The biggest problem with this theory is that first of all, I can't find any examples in my books of animate ushabti figures. The next biggest problem is that ushabtis would be serving a completely different purpose. They wouldn't be playing with the deceased person's cloak and making them look better or preparing their body, the ushabti was summoned by the master in Aari, or the Field of Reeds, which was a paradise for those who were 'true of heart'(I won't go into detail on this because that's irrelevant to the question), in which the ushabtis were summoned to do agricultural work, mostly farming, for the master in paradise.

This work is especially interesting because it's done as a portrait for the dead person. In Egyptian art, a scene with the deceased person and Anubis would most normally be depicting some part of their trials through Duat, where Anubis would lead them. In this case, however, it seems to simply be a portrait of the dead person, with Anubis and Nepthys guiding them. This is much more of a Roman interpretation than it is true to an Egyptian art piece so we need to start looking at this question from that angle. Egyptian influence is very important to the piece, as the possibility of shabtis presents, however to find a true answer we need to weigh the Roman side more heavily, this is a Roman portrait after all.

Here, I took some more pictures, I hope these help out somebody but as you can see, I've exhausted all of my books and knowledge on Egypt and I didn't really get anywhere. We'll need an expert of Roman art on this.

Couldn't they be graffiti? Like, some guy got bored waiting for something or somebody, found this old trashy papyrus that was probably headed for the trash , and just doodled little stick figures on it? The style doesn't match the rest of the painting at all.