Restoration Brings Ancient Egyptian Temple to Life, Revealing Vibrant Colors and Gold
The ongoing restoration of one of the largest temples in Egypt has revealed colorful paintings, gold leaf decorations, and testimonies by priests, providing a rare glimpse of what the ancient places of worship may have looked like in the past.
A team of researchers from Egypt and Germany has unveiled the initial findings from efforts to restore a section of the Edfu Temple in Upper Egypt, where ancient carvings colored with bright blue paint and figures gilded in gold cover the walls and columns. The restoration efforts also found graffiti written in the Demotic script, which served as direct testimony by priests entering the temple.
The Edfu Temple was dedicated to the worship of the falcon-headed god Horus, and is one of the best preserved temples in Egypt. The collaborative effort by the Supreme Council of Antiquities in Egypt and the University of Würzburg in Germany to restore the temple has been ongoing since 2021. The project seeks to clean its walls and document the different texts and scenes painted across the building.
A team of restorers cleaned up dust, bird poop, and soot from the higher wall areas of the barque sanctuary, uncovering some of the paintings that once covered the entire walls of the temple. The team also found traces of gold hues that were used to gild raised inscriptions, depicting gold jewelry, emblems and deities.
“The fact that the gods were completely gilded is particularly interesting,” Victoria Altmann-Wendling, project manager and research fellow at the Horus Beḥedety Project at University of Würzburg, said in a statement. “We find this in the textual sources that describe the flesh of the gods as consisting of gold.”
Colorful paint and gold were commonly used to adorn columns and obelisks in Ancient Egypt, according to the University of Würzburg. However, most of these elements have faded over time and are rarely found today. Some of the inscriptions uncovered in the Edfu Temple restoration project suggest that some of its buildings were covered with an overlay of metal foils made of gilded copper, Ayman Ashmawy, head of the Egyptian Antiquities Sector at the Supreme Council of Antiquities, said in a statement.
The restoration efforts also uncovered dipinti, or graffiti written in ink, in Demotic script (the cursive script derived from ancient Egyptian hieratic). The graffiti is the personal inscriptions written by priests as they entered the temple, with prayers addressed to Horus that reveal more insight into Ancient Egyptian religious practices. The Edfu Temple contains more religious texts and ritual scenes than almost any other Egyptian temple.
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