Fifteen years needed an archaeological mission from the Egyptian Museum of Barcelona to part of the temple of the Pharaoh Ptolemy I. at the site of Kom el-Ajmar Sharuna; a fact that this Thursday as the world premiere.
Sixty blocks, “perfectly sculpted with their deities and explanatory hieroglyphs about the history of the temple and the gods to whom the temple is dedicated,” are the ones that make up this discovery, the fence’s president explained. museum Jordi Clos
Clos recalled that in the 15 years they worked with the University of Tübingen and the High Council of Antiquities of Egypt, they excavated tombs, molds, burial equipment, ceramics, a large cave with more than 500 falcon mummies, “but this finding exceeds the above and opens new expectations for the future.”
The head of the excavation, Luis Manuel Gonzálvez, said that during two excavation campaigns (2019-2020), sixty large blocks were recovered, each weighing about 500 kilos and featuring various architectural elements, beautiful decorative friezes and important hieroglyphic texts.
With this finding restart ‘an adventure that began in 1838 when the Egyptologist Nestor L’Hôte first mentioned the existence of a temple in Sharuna, all traces of which were lost despite the search later carried out by explorers and Egyptologists at the end of the 19th century ”.
The ashlars were originally part of the temple walls and show architectural elements such as cornices or bulls (convex moldings) and beautiful decorative friezes formed by the succession of the head of the goddess of love, Hathor, and the two patterns that bear the name of the Pharaoh Ptolemy I.
According to Gonzálvez, the most important thing is without a doubt: “a hieroglyphic inscription that provides valuable information about the temple’s foundation, his name and the gods to whom he was dedicated ”.
The collection of recovered materials will, upon study, make it possible to propose a hypothetical reconstruction proposal of the temple erected two thousand years ago in the town of Hut-nesut, the ancient name of today’s Sharuna.
Restoring this important legacy of Pharaonic Egypt was not easy, according to Gonzálvez, because “ in the first place the deposit, which is located in an area where the water table appears less than a meter from the surface of the land, had to be a continuous drainage system. to be able to work in optimal conditions “.
The blocks and other archaeological remains were documented on site (especially drawings and photography), to be later transferred to the mission house laboratory; and once there, the tasks were focused on cleaning, restoring and saving, but not before the graphical documentation of the blocks was created.
For the individualized documentation of each ashlar, modern techniques have been applied that, based on photography, allow the construction of accurate and metrically correct three-dimensional models.
As a result of the excavation work, it was found that the sixty blocks of the Ptolemaic temple They were used in the 6th century for the construction of a Coptic Christian church, specifically the foundations and some elements of the paving.
It is true that all the blocks found were part of the top four rows of the Pharaonic Temple, from which it can be concluded that the temple was well preserved when the church builders began its dismantling.
Likewise, clear connections between some blocks were already observed during the excavation work, connections that have been confirmed and expanded in the research work carried out later by the Barcelona museum team.
The information collected with the sixty blocks allows the integration of other ashlars and fragments of the temple discovered in the past, such as those found by the Egyptologist Tadeus Smolenski at the beginning of the 20th century, currently in the Egyptian collections of Vienna and Budapest, or those recovered by the University of Tübingen since 1984.
This very special finding was not without epic, as the exceptional groundwater conditions added to the pandemic from February 2020, and given the impending closure of Egyptian airspace, the team chose not to return to Spain to do its job. complete.
The adventure continued with torrential rains (the heaviest in 100 years), snake plagues, sandstorms and other punishments, until the team was able to return in mid-May last year.
To announce both the project and the first results of the study, The Clos Archaeological Foundation plans to hold a temporary exhibition at the Egyptian Museum in the Spanish city of Barcelona, showcasing life-size replicas of many of the most important decorated blocks, made with advanced imaging techniques and 3D printing.
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