The Lost Chapel of Amenhotep III on the Elephantine Island, Aswan
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The BA Antiquities Museum organizes a lecture entitled “The Lost Chapel of Amenhotep III on the Elephantine Island, Aswan” on Tuesday, 28 August 2018; 1:00 pm, F3 Floating Room, BA Main Building. The lecture is delivered by Dr. Daniele Salvoldi, PhD in Egyptology, Lecturer of History of Architecture, Department of Architectural Engineering and Environmental Design, College of Engineering, Arab Academy for Science Technology and Maritime Transport.
The lecture revolves around an almost complete bark chapel built by Amenhotep III, probably on occasion of his second Heb Sed for the god Khnum. The chapel used to stand on the Elephantine Island until the beginning of the 19th century. Together with another small chapel built by Ramesses II, it was demolished in 1822 and the stone blocks were reused for new constructions in Aswan.
Nowadays, not a single trace of the chapels remain on the field. The only sources available are architectural cross sections and plans, relief copies, textual descriptions, and landscape views made by travelers before that date. These comprise Norden, Jomard, Vivant Denon, Ricci, Huyot, Linant, Barry, and Wilkinson among others.
The remarkable high quality of the drawings and texts allows an almost complete reconstruction of the two buildings and their history. The use of archival sources poses some methodological questions: how to locate the original site, assess measurements and proportions of the buildings, collate different copies of a single scene, create a paleography for copies of hieroglyphic inscriptions, and choose the right colors for a 3D-reconstruction.