#thutmoside

We began work on January 28, but the highlight of this week was the January 31 visit to the site by Anne Pasternak, the Brooklyn Museum Director, and members of the Museum’s Board of Governors. We were thrilled to be able to show them the site where Brooklyn has worked for the past 40+ years. We hope they enjoyed their visit.

As promised last week, here are the members of our team. Our foreman again this year is Abdel Aziz Farouk Sharid (left). He and our inspector, Haitham Mohamed Sa’ad el-Din are discussing the season’s work. The Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA) assigns an inspector to every expedition to act as liaison with the SCA and help facilitate the work. We are happy to have Haitham with us this season.

Besides Abdel Aziz, the Qufti who working with us this year are Abdel Aziz’s brother Ayman Farouk Sharid (center), the foreman for the Johns Hopkins University expedition who works with us when Hopkins isn’t in the field; and Mamdouh Kamil, who has worked with us for many seasons. All are from the village of Quft (ancient Coptos), which has a long tradition of archaeology going back to the late 19th century. Ayman and Abdel Aziz are the sons of one of the great Egyptian archaeologists, the late Farouk Sharid Mohamed, who was a beloved friend and treasured colleague. His sons are worthy successors to him.

You are looking northwest at the first court of Temple A, which stands northeast of the Mut Temple. We are working in two areas of the court this year. In 2019 we were able to confirm that that the row of limestone features on the court’s south side were sphinx bases. This season we want to see if there are remains of corresponding bases on the north side (right). We are also clearing the corridor between the south colonnade and the south wall of the court (left).

By the end of the week (February 2) the results in the north square were equivocal. Looking north, you can see an area of decayed limestone on the right side of the square that might be the remains of a sphinx base. On February 1, Mamdouh uncovered the round, dark feature to the left of the “sphinx base” that might be a tree hole. Sphinx avenues often had trees planted between the sculptures.

The work on the corridor was more productive. By the middle of the week Ayman had cleared a mass of broken stone and revealed the lowest course of the court’s south wall (left) and the footing of the temple’s 2nd Pylon. Both sit on a sand foundation that you can see below the blocks of stone. It was common to use sand in the foundations to level out uneven ground.

On February 1 our Dutch colleague, Jacobus (Jaap) van Dijk joined us for another season. First thing on the morning of February 2, Ayman called us over to show us an interesting find: a large relief-decorated block. Jaap immediately got down to have a look.

The block has a beautifully carved relief of Amun that clearly is Thutmoside in style, that is, from the reign of Hatshepsut and/or Thutmosis III, of the mid-15th century BC. What makes it particularly interesting is the small, shallowly carved graffito of a God’s Wife of Amun facing the Amun and dating stylistically to Dynasty 25 or 26, about 700 years after the god’s face was carved. God’s Wives of Amun were priestesses, usually the sisters or daughters of kings, who wielded great political power in the Third Intermediate Period and later.

Just west of the Amun block was smaller cube of stone with a sunk relief depiction of a man’s foot on base lines with the top of a cartouche and the “son of Re” title below. The style of the foot (very long) and the vertical element of the cartouche date it to the reign of Akhenaten. It probably came originally from his temple in East Karnak, built before the king moved the capital to Amarna. The artist paid attention to detail when painting the relief, painting the head of the goose (“son”) blue but its beak and eye red. The Brooklyn Museum has an interesting group of Amarna Period reliefs showing a pastoral scene.

By the end of the week Ayman and his crew had cleared the bases of the first 3 columns of the colonnade, working from west to east. The blocks of the bases are large: 70 cm by 125 cm and almost 100 cm thick.

We are also planning on restoring 2 fallen columns in the colonnaded porches in front of the Mut Temple. The one in the East Porch is shown here as it was found in 1979. Work hasn’t started on these yet; there will be more about the restoration next week.

One of our favorite birds is the tiny, bright bee eater, so called because it catches insects in mid-air. This is the first we’ve seen this season.

An unusual cloud formation seen at sunset one night. Angels? Extraterrestrials?

Dig Diary, February 12, 2018:

We finished the new retaining walls and stairway down to the Thutmoside gate on  February 6. We installed a post and rope barrier around the area for the safety of visitors as the excavation is quite deep. At last people will be able to get a close look at this important monument, one of the earliest standing structures in the Mut Precinct.

We were very lucky that Julia Harvey was willing to come again this year even though there is no pottery for her to sort. She arrived on site on February 3 and was an immense help with the final documentation and photography of the site’s Sekhmet statues. Here she is dusting off the lap of the large and famous statue in the Mut Temple’s 2nd Court so I can photograph it.

In 2001 we painted inventory numbers on all the Sekhmet statues then visible at the site. On February 6, Julia and I added numbers to the statues found since then but not numbered. The tools of the trade for documentation: brushes to clean dust off surfaces about to be photographed or numbered, a mirror to cast good light on inscriptions, and paint for numbering. On the right, adding its number to the large statue Julia dusted a few days ago.

Speaking of Sekhmets, Jaap found two pieces of a Sekhmet inscription lying on the mastaba (platform on which stone blocks are kept) at the front of the precinct. It only took him a few minutes to realize that they belong to a badly damaged statue in the Mut Temple’s 1st Court.  Incredibly, he also found a fragment of the statue’s base nearby; the pieces fit perfectly! Congratulations, Jaap!

Most of the effort this week has centered around the restoration of the Sekhmet statue in Temple A. Putting the two sections of the base together was the most nerve-wracking as the stone remains fragile even after consolidation. On the left, Mohamed Abdu pours epoxy into the holes in the rear part of the base to hold the stainless steel rods once the two pieces are joined. Then comes the painstaking effort to lower one piece onto the other. Breaths were held all round.

The two pieces are almost together (left), after careful adjusting to make sure everything lines up properly. Once the pieces were in place, Salah Salim (left) and Mohamed Abdu (center) filled in the cracks in the join. They are justifiably proud of their work, as is Ayman Farouk Sharid (right), the Qufti who is working with them.

Even though the block of stone is much larger, putting the body of the statue onto the restored base was child’s play by comparison to fixing the base. The two pieces were joined, aligned and attached over the course of work on February 5.

Much to our delight on our last day of work (February 7), I found Sekhmet’s left hand sitting on a block in the temple, and the conservators found her right ankle among the miscellaneous chunks of diorite nearby.

Mohamed, Salah and I check to be sure that the hand really does fit. It snapped into place beautifully.

By February 6th, the detached pieces of knee, right leg and back were in place, and on the 7th, Mohamed and Salah re-attached what is left of the statue’s torso. Now instead of just a lower half, we have an almost complete statue. Here is how she looked at the end of work. An improvised funnel on her right knee allows epoxy to be infused into a deep crack between the knees and the body of the statue.

As you can see from the picture of the statue’s right side, there is still considerable work to do to fill in the many cracks in the stone, some shallow, some deep. Mohamed has the painstaking task using an epoxy colored to match the stone. Without this infilling, moisture and dirt can infiltrate the cracks and cause further damage to the statue. He and Salah will stay on at the site to finish the work after we have gone.