The discoveries shed further light on what the eighteenth dynasty pharaoh's temple would have looked like
By Nevine El-Aref , Wednesday 8 Mar 2017
The Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project has discovered a magnificent statue in black granite representing king Amenhotep III seated on the throne.
Project director Hourig Sourouzian told Ahram Online that the statue is 248 cm high, 61 cm wide and 110cm deep.
It was found in the great court of the temple of Amenhotep III on Luxor's West Bank.
"It is a masterpiece of ancient Egyptian sculpture: extremely well carved and perfectly polished," Sourouzian said, adding that the statue shows the king with very juvenile facial features, which indicates that it was probably commissioned early in his reign.
A similar statue was discovered by the same team in 2009 and is now temporarily on display in the Luxor Museum of Ancient Egyptian Art.
When the site's restoration is complete, Sourouzian said, the pair of statues would be displayed again in the temple, in their original positions.
Mahmoud Afifi, head of the Ministry of Antiquities Ancient Egyptian antiquities department said the team has discovered up to 66 parts of statues of the goddess Sekhmet this archaeological season. These statues represent the goddess sitting or standing holding a papyrus sceptre and an ankh — the symbol of life.
Showing posts with label Conservation. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Conservation. Show all posts
Thursday, March 9, 2017
Thursday, January 21, 2016
X-Rays Reveal The Secrets of Egyptian Scrolls
By Megan Gannon ON 1/17/16
“Usually, in this area, no visitor gets in,” Verena Lepper tells me on a gray Friday morning in Berlin. She gently closed a set of double doors behind us, careful not to create any vibrations in the walls. We were standing in a room that was white from floor to ceiling, without a single scuff. It felt more like an airlock on a spaceship than a vestibule in the city’s Archaeological Center, completed just four years ago. There, I would sign my third guestbook of the day.
The procedure was not just a German reflex for meticulous record-keeping but also a security policy: Inside was the nation’s largest collection of papyri, among the four largest in the world, two floors crammed with scrolls that were pressed between glass and tucked away in metal drawers. Although academics hesitate to put a price tag on research material they consider priceless, any one of these scraps of paper would sell for thousands of dollars on the antiquities market.
Among the manuscripts was a section of The Ahiqar, a proverb-loaded narrative about a betrayed chancellor of the Assyrian King Sennacherib. The 2,500-year-old text was written in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, and one of the 15 that Lepper, a curator at the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in Berlin, knows herself. “Literary studies people claim this is the first novel ever to be written,” she says. But for Lepper what is most interesting about this first copy of The Ahiqar is where it came from: Elephantine Island, a narrow patch of land less than a square mile large in the middle of the Nile River, opposite Aswan in southern Egypt.
The hundreds of documents that have turned up at Elephantine include 10 different languages and range four continuous millennia, from Egypt’s Old Kingdom around 2500 B.C. to the Middle Ages. “I’m not aware of any other place in the world where you have 4,000 years covered by textural resources from one single place,” Lepper says. And yet most of the texts from the island haven’t been studied or published—and many haven’t even been unfurled because they're so delicate.
“Usually, in this area, no visitor gets in,” Verena Lepper tells me on a gray Friday morning in Berlin. She gently closed a set of double doors behind us, careful not to create any vibrations in the walls. We were standing in a room that was white from floor to ceiling, without a single scuff. It felt more like an airlock on a spaceship than a vestibule in the city’s Archaeological Center, completed just four years ago. There, I would sign my third guestbook of the day.
The procedure was not just a German reflex for meticulous record-keeping but also a security policy: Inside was the nation’s largest collection of papyri, among the four largest in the world, two floors crammed with scrolls that were pressed between glass and tucked away in metal drawers. Although academics hesitate to put a price tag on research material they consider priceless, any one of these scraps of paper would sell for thousands of dollars on the antiquities market.
Among the manuscripts was a section of The Ahiqar, a proverb-loaded narrative about a betrayed chancellor of the Assyrian King Sennacherib. The 2,500-year-old text was written in Aramaic, the language Jesus spoke, and one of the 15 that Lepper, a curator at the Egyptian Museum and Papyrus Collection in Berlin, knows herself. “Literary studies people claim this is the first novel ever to be written,” she says. But for Lepper what is most interesting about this first copy of The Ahiqar is where it came from: Elephantine Island, a narrow patch of land less than a square mile large in the middle of the Nile River, opposite Aswan in southern Egypt.
The hundreds of documents that have turned up at Elephantine include 10 different languages and range four continuous millennia, from Egypt’s Old Kingdom around 2500 B.C. to the Middle Ages. “I’m not aware of any other place in the world where you have 4,000 years covered by textural resources from one single place,” Lepper says. And yet most of the texts from the island haven’t been studied or published—and many haven’t even been unfurled because they're so delicate.
Sunday, February 15, 2015
Papyri on display
A collection of papyri from the Fayoum has been put on display for the first time in nine decades at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, writes Nevine El-Aref
Some 80 km southeast of Cairo is the small village of Karanis, once one of the largest Graeco-Roman towns in Fayoum. It was established in antiquity by Ptolemy II Philadelphus, as part of a scheme to settle Greek mercenaries among indigenous Egyptians and exploit the fertile Fayoum basin.
Karanis flourished until the end of the 3rd century CE, when the town started to decline due to troubles in the wider Roman Empire. The town was abandoned by the beginning of the 5th century, as part of momentous socioeconomic, political and religious changes taking place throughout the Mediterranean region.
The site was forgotten, buried by the sands, until the early 19th century when farmers unearthed papyri among organic debris left by the ancient inhabitants. It is these papyri, suitably conserved and restored, that have now been put on display at the Egyptian Museum.
Archaeological excavation, led by British Egyptologist Bernard Pyne Grenfell and papyrologist Arthur Surridge Hunt, started in Karanis in 1895. However, they did not continue their work, deciding that the site had been too plundered in antiquity to produce anything of value. The few papyri and artefacts they stumbled upon were not considered important enough to lead to a better understanding of the history of the site during the Graeco-Roman period.
In 1924 the archaeological rescue of the site began, continuing for the next 12 years under the leadership of an American mission from Michigan University directed by Francis W Kelsey. Two temples, residential houses and urban districts were discovered, along with cisterns, public baths and a collection of household objects of different shapes, sizes and materials. A large collection of papyri, now exhibited at the Kelsey Museum in Michigan in the US, was also unearthed.
Some 80 km southeast of Cairo is the small village of Karanis, once one of the largest Graeco-Roman towns in Fayoum. It was established in antiquity by Ptolemy II Philadelphus, as part of a scheme to settle Greek mercenaries among indigenous Egyptians and exploit the fertile Fayoum basin.
Karanis flourished until the end of the 3rd century CE, when the town started to decline due to troubles in the wider Roman Empire. The town was abandoned by the beginning of the 5th century, as part of momentous socioeconomic, political and religious changes taking place throughout the Mediterranean region.
The site was forgotten, buried by the sands, until the early 19th century when farmers unearthed papyri among organic debris left by the ancient inhabitants. It is these papyri, suitably conserved and restored, that have now been put on display at the Egyptian Museum.
Archaeological excavation, led by British Egyptologist Bernard Pyne Grenfell and papyrologist Arthur Surridge Hunt, started in Karanis in 1895. However, they did not continue their work, deciding that the site had been too plundered in antiquity to produce anything of value. The few papyri and artefacts they stumbled upon were not considered important enough to lead to a better understanding of the history of the site during the Graeco-Roman period.
In 1924 the archaeological rescue of the site began, continuing for the next 12 years under the leadership of an American mission from Michigan University directed by Francis W Kelsey. Two temples, residential houses and urban districts were discovered, along with cisterns, public baths and a collection of household objects of different shapes, sizes and materials. A large collection of papyri, now exhibited at the Kelsey Museum in Michigan in the US, was also unearthed.
Monday, November 5, 2012
How tourism cursed tomb of King Tut
Damage from breath of visitors forces closure of chamber
by Alastair Beach, Sunday 4 November 2012
At around 10am on November 4, 1922, an unknown and slightly prickly archaeologist was working with his team to clear away some rubble close to the tomb of Ramses VI, the twentieth dynasty pharaoh who ruled Egypt during the twelfth century BC.
After five years of toil in the Valley of the Kings, the vast desert funerary complex close to modern day Luxor, Howard Carter had little to show for his relic-hunting efforts.
Time was running out, and Lord Carnarvon, his benefactor back in Britain, had reluctantly granted him just one more season to come up with something spectacular.
In the mid-morning heat exactly 90 years ago today, it arrived.
As Carter and his men cleaned up the debris near some ancient stone huts, they inadvertently stumbled upon the steps leading down into the tomb of Tutankhamun.
The unprecedented find – the first time a royal burial chamber had been found containing all of its treasures – triggered a wave of Egyptmania in the West and cemented Carter’s place in history.
Yet although Egyptologists initially hailed the discovery for the unique insights it provided into ancient burial rites, the tomb itself has not fared well since being prised open after 3000 years of regal isolation.
Saturday, October 27, 2012
Penn Museum opens conservation lab to the public
Written by Margie Fishman Gannett
In ancient Egypt, the prayer for the afterlife could be simple or complex, depending on the deceased’s financial wherewithal. Family members selected from among 1,200 “magical spells” to protect their loved ones, carved in chicken-scratch script on coffins. Requests included a wish for plentiful bread and beer, a nice burial in the western desert, or traveling for eternity on the roads of the gods.
Before there was Greece, Persia or Rome, there was ancient Egypt thriving along the Nile 7,000 years ago. What the powerful civilization left behind — in the form of elaborate coffins, funerary masks, shrouds and mummified remains — informs the story of humanity.
Now, the Penn Museum is giving the public a behind-the-scenes tour of the meticulous conservation process — an integral step before artifacts can move from storage to the exhibition floor.
Housed in a glass box in a third-floor gallery, “In the Artifact Lab: Conserving Egyptian Mummies,” allows visitors to interact with conservators stripping away millennia of grime to uncover the world’s first picture frames, fairytales and graffiti art. Twice a day, the team slides open a window to answer questions about the 2,000-square-foot exhibition. An interactive whiteboard details their tasks for the day, supplemented by a blog at www.penn.museum/sites/artifactlab.
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