Edfu temple restoration reveals original inscriptions, colors, gold

Egyptian conservators working with a research team from the University of Würzburg have uncovered the original vivid colored paint and gilding of the reliefs in the Temple of Horus in Edfu, southern Egypt. The restoration has also revealed inscriptions on the outer walls and gates written in demotic script by temple priests. Known as dipinti, the Italian for “painted” because they were painted on the walls in ink, the graffiti are prayers to Horus and shed new light on the beliefs and practices of the priests of Horus in the Ptolemaic era.

The Temple of Horus at Edfu was built between 237 and 57 B.C., during the reigns of kings Ptolemy III-XII. It is the best preserved temple in Egypt and contains more religious inscriptions and scenes of rituals than almost any of the far more ancient temples in Egypt that predated the Ptolemies by 2,000 years plus.

Egyptian conservators have been working since 2021 to clean and consolidate the temple walls with the aim of restoring the full legibility of the texts and images engraved on the sandstone. They removed layers of dust, bird guano, soot, salts and other deposits that obscured the vivid paint that once covered the wall reliefs.

The multi-coloured paintings can now provide further details of the scenes and hieroglyphs that could not be identified in the relief alone, e.g. elements of the clothing or the offerings. The craftsmen also used colour to correct the hieroglyphs carved in stone: “In the painting, we are capturing an ancient quality management,” says Professor Martin A. Stadler, director of the Horus Beḥedety Project Würzburg. “The fact that the gods were completely gilded is particularly interesting. We find this in the textual sources that describe the flesh of the gods as consisting of gold,” adds Victoria Altmann-Wendling.

Traces of delicate gold leaf have been found on the jewelry of pharaohs and covering the entire bodies of gods. Ancient sources chronicle that massive parts of Egyptian temples were gilded, including columns, gates and obelisks, using thick foils of gilded copper. Archaeologically, the only remains of these huge sections of gilding have been found in holes in walls.

Thin gold leaf decorations, however, are only rarely documented due to their great fragility. At Edfu, particles of this type of gilding have now been discovered in numerous places on the higher wall areas of the barque sanctuary. […]

“The gilding of the figures presumably not only served to symbolically immortalise and deify them but also contributed to the mystical aura of the room. It must have been very impressive, especially when the sunlight was shining in,” says Dr Victoria Altmann-Wendling, project manager and research fellow in the Horus Beḥedety Project at JMU.

The University of Würzburg team has been documenting and digitizing the entire temple since 2016. They are publishing a new collection of epigraphy that will include the priests’ demotic graffiti as well annotated translations of the hieroglyphic texts.

* This article was originally published here