19.04.2004 - Clive'2 Tag in Luxor

Clive verbrachte den Tag in Luxor mit dem Besuch des Ägyptischen Museums

Clive spent the day with the visit of the Egyptian museum in Luxor

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The Luxor Museum

The Luxor Museum of Ancient Egyptian Art is located about one kilometer north of the Temple of Luxor, on the road that skirts the Nile and leads to Karnak. This museum, designed by the Egyptian architect Mahmud al-Hakim, was inaugurated in 1975 and houses some masterpieces of Egyptian sculpture found during the digs carried out in the Thebes area. In 1990 a large underground hall was added to the museum, and the magnificent statues found in 1989 in the cachette of Luxor temple were put on exhibit.
The museum is rectangular and has twi stories. The upper one contains many finds, including a colossal head of Amenophis III from the mortuary temple of the pgaraoh on the west bank of the Nile.

Colossal head of Amenophis III

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A lovely statue of the god Amun with Tutankhamun's features which came from the cache discovered north of pylon VII of the Temple of Karnak; a cow that was part of the treasure in the tomb of Tutankhamun a greywacke statue of Thutmosis III that was also found in the pylon VII cache;

Statue of Thutmosis III

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and an impressive calcite sculpture group portraying Amenophis III and the crocodile god Sobek that was usurped by Ramesses II and discovered in 1967 at the bottom of a canal near the village of Armant on the west bank of the Nile. A broad staircase goes from the lower floor of the museum to the underground hall dedicated to the statues discovered in 1989 in the Temple of Luxor. In the back of this hall is the most important find in the cachette, the large quartzite statue of Amenophis III, which is 2.45 meters tall and stands on the sled used to transport it.
Among the other finds (which totaled 22 pieces), the most interesting are the diorite statue of Hathor, the statue of the goddess lunit, a large headless cobra with the cartouches of the Ethiopian pharaoh Taharqa, and a sculpture group of the pharaoh Haremheb before the god Aten.

Statue of the goddess Hathor

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The upper floor has other very important finds: the red granite head of Senusret III discovered in 1970 in front of pylon IV of the Temple of Karnak; and the statue of Amenhotep, Son of Hapu, one of the most famous officials in the court of Amenophis III and the architect of his most important royal monuments, who is represented in the dress of a scribe.
This latter statue, sculpted in black granite, was found in 1913 in front of pylon X of the Temple of Karnak. Karnak also yielded a Osirian painted limestone pillar portraying the pharaoh Senusret, as well as an Osirian sandstone statue of Amenophis IV that followed the canons typical of the Amarna art style. And it was precisley the reign of Amenophis IV (who later changed the name to Akhenaten) that produced the most famous and important find in the entire museum; the so-called talatat wall, which takes up most of the wall space on the upper floor. This wall is seventeen meters long, three meters high, and is made up of 283 sandstones blocks elegantly decorated with multicolored bas-reliefs which the Arab workman called talatat, from the word talato, which means "Three", perhaps because their length and height coresponded to about three handbreadths. These blocks,which on an average measure 54 x 24 x 20 centimeters, were originally part of the Gem-pa-aten,the Temple of Aten that Amenophis IV had built at Karnak. This edifice, east of the portal of Nectanebo, was later dismantled and the decorated blocks were used as filling material inside pylon IX, where in 1968 - 69 about 40.000 of them were found almost wholly intact. These talatats were studied, and the most beautiful ones were ressembled in their original position inside the museum. They are the only existing example of decoration of a temple of Aten. The stones on the left hand part of the wall represent adoration of the god Aten on the part of Amenophis, who thus received the sun's rays, each of which ends with a hieroglyph of the "vital breath".

the wall of talatats

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In the right.hand section of the wall most of the scenes regard the daily life of workmen and artisans who worked on the temple. Among the other finds on this floor is a series of 63 gilded bronze rosettes that were part of a much larger group (637 pieces) inserted in the pall which covered the sarcophagus of Tutankhamun, and the elegant calcite lid of a canopic jar with the features of Queen Tuya, the consort od Sethos I and mother of Ramesses II, which was found in 1972 in Tomb 80 in the Valley of the Queens.