Fifteen years needed an archeological mission from the Egyptian Museum in Barcelona to find part of the temple Pharaoh Ptolemy I. at the Kom el-Ajmar Sharuna website; a fact that this Thursday as the world premiere.
Sixty blocks, “perfectly sculpted with their divinities and hieroglyphs explaining the history of the temple and the gods to whom it is dedicated” are what make up this discovery, explained the president of the enclosure museum, Jordi Clos.
Clos recalled that in the 15 years they have been excavating with the University of Tübingen and the Supreme Council of Antiquities of Egypt, they have found graves, molds, funerary equipment, pottery, a large cave with over 500 falcon mummies, “but this finding goes beyond the above and opens up 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, weighing about 500 kilograms each and presenting various architectural elements, beautiful decorative friezes and important hieroglyphic texts.
With this finding restart “an adventure that began in 1838 when Egyptologist Nestor L´Hôte first mentioned the existence of a temple in Sharuna, of which all traces have been lost despite subsequent searches by explorers and Egyptologists in the late nineteenth century. “
The saints were originally part of the temple walls and feature 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 containing the name of Pharaoh Ptolemy I.
According to Gonzálvez, the most important thing is, without a doubt, “a hieroglyphic inscription that provides valuable information about the founding of the temple, his name and the gods to whom he was dedicated ”.
The set of recovered materials will allow, after the study, to propose a hypothetical proposal for the reconstruction of the temple that was built two thousand years ago in the city of Hut-nesut, the old name of the current Sharuna.
The recovery of this important heritage of Pharaonic Egypt was not easy, according to Gonzálvez, because “first of all, the deposit, which is located in an area where the water table appears less than one meter from 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 in situ (drawing and photography, in particular), to be later transferred to the mission house-laboratory; and once there, the tasks focused on cleaning, restoration and storage, but not before the graphic documentation of the blocks was completed.
For the individualized documentation of each sarmar, modern techniques have been applied which, based on photography, allow the construction of precise and metrically correct three-dimensional models.
Following excavation work, it was found that the sixty blocks of the Ptolemaic temple They were used in the sixth century to build a Coptic Christian church, specifically the foundations and some elements of the pavement.
It happens that all the blocks found were part of the four upper rows of the pharaonic temple, from which it can be deduced that the temple was well preserved when the church builders began the dismantling.
Also, during the excavation works, clear connections were already observed between some of the blocks, connections that were confirmed and extended in the research activity carried out later by the museum team from Barcelona.
The information collected with the sixty blocks allows the integration of other carcasses and fragments of the temple discovered in the past, such as those found by the Egyptologist Tadeus Smolenski in the early twentieth century, now in the Egyptian collections of Vienna and Budapest, or those recovered by the University of Tübingen in 1984.
This very special finding was not without epics, as the exceptional circumstances of groundwater have been added to the pandemic since February 2020 and given the imminent closure of Egyptian airspace, the team chose not to return to Spain and complete activity.
The adventure continued with torrential rains (the heaviest in the last 100 years), snake plagues, sandstorms and other sanctions, until the team managed to return in mid-May last year.
In order to make public both the project and the first results of the research, The Clos Archaeological Foundation intends to organize a temporary exhibition at the Egyptian Museum in the Spanish city of Barcelona, in which large-scale replicas of many of the most significant decorated blocks, made of sophisticated imaging techniques and 3D printing, will be exhibited.
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