Monday, September 12, 2011

Photo for Today - the Temple of Luxor



Night time view.

Statue of Amenhotep III and Tiy.

5 comments:

Anonymous said...

Sorry to be a nuisance (!), is this not Amen and Mut with the presumed features of Tutankhamen? There is an article on its restoration in Egyptian Archaeology No 11 1997 p.19 (article by W. Raymond Johnson) CJB

Andie said...

You're anything but a nuisance. I took the identification from a book by Kent Weeks (the Illustrated Guide to Luxor, AUC p.127) but if it may have been a mis-print, or the wrong caption associated with this particular photograph. In neither his photo or mine could I see the hieroglyphs on the base, which might have been helpful.

Anonymous said...

Thanks for saying that! It is difficult when describing photos for a book as you are dependent on the printers connecting the right captions.
The statue has the cartouches of Horemheb, but if you look closely at the real thing, it is possible to see that the interior of the cartouche has been lowered and then recarved. The female statue of the dyad has signs of an ancient repair to the nose. When this was done is open to conjecture, though I suspect it was later than Horemheb. CJB

Anonymous said...

I did a bit more research on the female half. The whole face is a renewal with the nose being a subsequent repair. When the statue was restored in the 1990s, the face was found in store in Cairo at the museum and brought back to Luxor to be re-united with the head. According to W.R. Johnson, the face was replaced in Ptolemaic times. His conclusion is based on stylistic traits.
The Ptolemies conducted a surprising amount of restoration at Thebes, choosing to repair rather than totally replace as they did at Edfu or Denderah for example (I researched Karnak in this era for my Master's thesis). CJB

Andie said...

I'm very glad that I put in an incorrect caption - it was great to find out more about the statues.