fifteen years need an archeological mission of the Egyptian Museum of Barcelona to find part of the temple of the Pharaoh Ptolemy I at the Kom el-Ajmar Sharuna site; a fact that this was presented Thursday as a world first.
Sixty blocks, “perfectly sculpted with their divinities and explanatory hieroglyphics on the history of the temple and the gods to which it is dedicated” are those that make up this discovery, explained the president of the enclosure museum, Jordi Clos.
Clos recalled that in the 15 years they have been excavating together with the University of Tübingen and the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt they found tombs, molds, funerary utensils, pottery, a large cave with over 500 hawk mummies, “But this finding surpasses the previous one and opens up new expectations for the future.”
The person most responsible for the excavation, Luis Manuel Gonzálvez, He said that during two excavation campaigns (2019-2020) sixty large blocks have been recovered, weighing about 500 kilos each and showing various architectural elements, beautiful decorative friezes and important hieroglyphic texts.
With this finding restarts “an adventure that began in 1838 when Egyptologist Nestor L’Hôte first mentioned the existence of a temple in Sharuna, Of which all trace was lost despite later research by explorers and Egyptologists in the late 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 cartridges they contain. 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 foundation of the temple, His name and the gods to whom he was dedicated “.
The set of recovered materials will allow, after its study, to propose a hypothetical reconstruction of the temple that two thousand years ago was erected in the city of Hut-nesut, ancient name of the current Sharuna.
The recovery of this important legacy of Pharaonic Egypt was not easy, according to Gonzálvez, since “first of all, the deposit, that is in an zone in which the phreatic level appears to less than a meter of the surface of the land, had to have a continuous drainage system to be able to work in optimal conditions “.
The blocks and other archaeological remains were documented on site (drawing and photography, especially), and then moved to the mission house-laboratory; and once there, the tasks focused on cleaning, restoring, and storage, not without first performing the graphic documentation of the blocks.
For the individualized documentation of each ashlar modern techniques were applied that from the photography allow to construct precise and metrically correct three-dimensional models.
As a result of the excavation work, it was found that the sixty blocks of the Ptolemaic temple were used in the sixth century for the construction of a Coptic Christian church, specifically the foundations and some elements of the pavement.
The circumstance occurs that all the found blocks comprised of the four rows superiors of the Pharaonic temple, reason why it is possible to be deduced that the temple was well conserved at the time at which the constructors of the church began their dismantling.
Also, during the excavation work, clear connections were already observed between some of the blocks, 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 it allows to integrate other ashlars and fragments of the temple discovered in the past, Such as those found by the Egyptologist Tadeus Smolenski in the early twentieth 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 pandemic was added to the exceptional circumstances of groundwater from February 2020, and in the face of the imminence of the closure of Egyptian airspace the team went choose not to return to Spain and complete their work.
The adventure continued with torrential rains (the most intense in 100 years), snake plagues, sandstorms and other hardships, until the team was able to return in mid-May last year.
To publicize both the project and the first results of the research, the Clos Archaeological Foundation intends to hold a temporary exhibition at the Egyptian Museum in the Spanish town of Barcelona, in which full-scale replicas of many of the most significant decorated blocks will be exhibited, made from sophisticated 3D image and print processing techniques.
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