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The Epigraphic Survey

INTRODUCTION

The Epigraphic Survey based at Chicago House in Luxor, Egypt, is directed by W. Raymond Johnson, PhD, Research Associate (Associate Professor).

The mission of the Survey since its founding in 1924 has been to produce photographs and precise line drawings of the inscriptions and relief scenes on major temples and tombs at Luxor for publication. More recently the Survey has expanded its program to include conservation. In addition to the field director, the professional staff of the Survey normally includes three to four epigraphers, four to five artists, two photographers, a librarian, and several conservators. The epigraphers and artists include both graduate students and post-doctoral scholars who have received training in all aspects of Egyptology. The Epigraphic Survey completed its 80th anniversary field season at the end of April, 2004.

1926-1927 Epigraphic Survey Staff Photograph

2004-2005 Epigraphic Survey Staff Photograph

THE 'CHICAGO HOUSE METHOD'

Founder James Henry Breasted committed the Epigraphic Survey to the preservation of Egypt's cultural heritage by non-destructive means: through documentation so precise it could stand alone as a replacement in the absence of the original monument. Large-format photography (8x10, 5x7, and 4x5 inch negatives) is an essential tool in this process, and one of the first goals of Chicago House was to create a photographic archive of as many of Egypt's accessible standing monuments as possible, photographed inside and out.

But Breasted understood that photographs alone cannot capture all the details of the often damaged wall scenes of individual monuments; the light source that illuminates also casts shadows which obscure details. To supplement and clarify the photographic record, precise line drawings are produced at Chicago House which combine the talents of the photographer, artist, and Egyptologist. First the wall surface is carefully photographed, with a large-format camera whose lens is positioned exactly parallel to the wall to eliminate distortion. From these negatives photographic enlargements up to 20x24 inches are produced, printed on a special matt-surface paper with an emulsion coating that can take pencil and ink lines.

An artist takes this enlarged photographic print mounted on a drawing board to the wall itself, and pencils directly onto the photograph all of the carved detail that is visible on the wall surface, adding those details that are not visible or clear on the photograph. Back at the house the penciled lines are carefully inked with a series of weighted line conventions to show the three dimensions of the relief, and damage that interrupts the carved line is rendered with thin, broken lines that imitate the nature of the break.

When the inking is complete, the entire photograph is immersed in an iodine bath that dissolves away the photographic image, leaving just the ink drawing. The drawing is then blueprinted, the blueprint is cut into sections and each section is mounted on a sheet of stiff white paper. These 'collation sheets' are taken back to the wall where the inked details on the blueprint are thoroughly examined by two Egyptologist epigraphers, one after the other. These epigraphers pencil corrections and refinements on the blueprint itself with explanations and instructions to the artist written in the margins. The collation sheets are then returned to the artist, who in turn takes them back to the wall and carefully checks the epigraphers' corrections, one by one. When everyone is in agreement, the corrections are added to the inked drawing back in the studio, the transferred corrections are checked for accuracy by the epigraphers, and the drawing receives a final review by the field director.

Consultations between artist, epigraphers, and field director, the concensus of all talents combined, ensures a finished 'facsimile' drawing that is faithful to what is preserved on the wall in every detail; this is the essence of what is generally referred to as the 'Chicago House Method.' The corrected ink drawings, photographs, text translations, commentary, and glossaries are then taken back to Chicago for processing and publication in large folio volumes for distribution worldwide.

RECENT PUBLICATIONS

The publications of the Epigraphic Survey are universally recognized as setting the standard for epigraphic recording. The Survey's most recent publication, 'Reliefs and Inscriptions at Luxor Temple, Volume 2: The Facade, Portals, Upper Register Scenes, Columns, Marginalia, and Statuary in the Colonnade Hall' (Chicago, 1998) contains 99 plates of drawings and photographs as well as a booklet of text translations and commentary. The diversity of material in this volume makes it one of the most exciting publications in the history of the Survey. RILT 2 completes the documentation and publication of all the standing wall remains in the great Colonnade Hall of Luxor Temple, one of the largest, most beautiful, and most threatened monuments in Luxor. Its companion volume, 'Reliefs and Inscriptions at Luxor Temple, Volume 1: The Festival Procession of Opet in the Colonnade Hall' (Chicago: 1994), contains 128 plates and a text booklet. This volume, the Epigraphic Survey's largest ever, documents in detailed drawings and photographs the first register of decoration in the hall, built by Amenhotep III but largely decorated during the reign of Tutankhamun and his successors. It is one of the very few monuments of Tutankhamun to survive to the present day.

The first register reliefs, executed in the lively style of the late Amarna Period, commemorate one of the most important annual festivals in the Egyptian religious calender, the great Festival of Opet, the occasion when the god Amun-Re traveled from his 'palace' at Karnak to his birthplace at Luxor Temple to experience rebirth and rejuvenation. The Opet reliefs document in particular detail the lavish water procession associated with this festival, when Amun-Re, his wife, the mother-goddess Mut, and their son the moon-god Khonsu traveled from Karnak to Luxor Temple and, later, back to Karnak in great, gilded divine barges towed by the elaborate royal barges of the king and queen. The royal barges in turn were towed by numerous smaller boats manned by dozens of oarsmen, while the whole water procession was escorted by a cheering populace on the riverbanks. It's hard to see on the wall now unless the light is just right, but you can see it all in our publication!

CURRENT EPIGRAPHIC PROJECTS: MEDINET HABU AND LUXOR TEMPLE

When the Epigraphic Survey received the concession for Medinet Habu in 1924, our primary interest was the mortuary temple of Ramesses III which the Survey finished documenting in the 1950s. But the Medinet Habu precinct is filled with additional satellite shrines, decorated wells, gates, and other monuments from many periods for which we have the responsibility to document, conserve, and publish. The staff of Chicago House photographers, artists, and Egyptologist epigraphers is currently recording the small temple of Amun at Medinet Habu of Pharaohs Hatshepsut and Thutmosis III called Djeser Set, or 'Holy of Place,' where a pre-creation form of the god Amun was believed to reside, and which Ramesses III enclosed within his funerary complex to lend his own temple greater sanctity. Excavations by the University of Chicago in the early 1930s indicated that the 18th Dynasty temple replaced an earlier temple from perhaps as early as the Middle Kingdom, and its growing theological importance is attested by its expansion in the Kushite, Ptolemaic, and Roman periods, when ever grander and more elaborate entryways were added to the complex.

The majority of the drawings of the painted chapels of Hatshepsut and Thutmosis III and their eastern facade, the earliest portion of the Eighteenth Dynasty temple, have now been successfully completed and collated, and await one final paint collation after the reliefs in that area have been completely cleaned. They will be published in the first volume projected for the small Amun temple series, while the second volume will be devoted to the Thutmoside bark sanctuary area and miscellaneous graffiti, currently underway. The third volume will document the 25th Dynasty, Kushite additions to the small temple, and the fourth volume will be dedicated to the Ptolemaic and Roman additions to the east.

CONSERVATION PROGRAMS

Under Lanny Bell's directorship twenty years ago the Epigraphic Survey added conservation to its program and a conservator to the staff. Now, because of rapidly changing conditions in Egypt that are causing the monuments to decay at an ever faster rate, we have expanded our conservation programs even further. Recently the Epigraphic Survey received a five-year grant from the Egyptian Antiquities Project and The United States Agency for International Development, administered through the American Research Center and generously approved by the Egyptian Supreme Council of Antiquities, for documentation and conservation of the Thutmoside temple at Medinet Habu and its later additions. Thanks to this grant Chicago House has been able to seal the rooftop of the small Amun temple against rainwater (a more frequent occurence recently) and begin the cleaning of the salt, dirt, and soot-stained painted reliefs below. As this cleaning is finished, newly exposed painted details are being added to the drawings which will appear in Volume 1.

Our program at the Medinet Habu small Aumn temple also includes the restoration of the sandstone flooring in the two central chapels, now largely missing. This necessitated the careful cleaning of the floor debris, made up of the backfill from the excavations of our predecessors in the 1930s. Among the more interesting finds in the floor debris were six large and two hundred medium to small fragments of a colossal granodiorite seated dyad of Thutmosis III and the god Amun. The two largest fragments were published by Uvo Holscher in The Excavation of Medinet Habu 2, The Temples of the Eighteenth Dynasty in 1939. During the 2000-2001 season conservator Lotfi Hassan and stone cutter Dany Roy joined the largest base fragments and secured them with stainless steel dowels 2 centimeters in diameter and almost a meter in length, which were epoxied into place. The joined statue base was raised and moved into the exact center of the central sanctuary, where the dyad had originally been set up, over a damp-coursed, reinforced concrete foundation. On March 24, 2001 the top section of the statue was winched into position and epoxied, completing the joining of the six largest pieces of the group. The reassembled dyad, broken at the top, stands almost 3 meters in height, even without the heads. Analysis of the smaller fragments, including sections of the king's legs and kilt, will be completed in future seasons, after which they will be joined to the core statue. It is a rare opportunity to restore a piece of Egyptian sculpture to its original architectural setting. Because this particular dyad was an integral part of the architecture of the central sanctuary, it is a dramatic addition to the room.

Although the Epigraphic Survey has in the past dealt exclusively with standing wall remains, an exciting opportunity presented itself at Luxor Temple to incorporate fragmentary material in our publication program. The upper walls of the Colonnade Hall and other parts of Luxor Temple are mostly missing, quarried away in the medieval period when stone was needed for house, church, or mosque construction. Excavations in the 1950s and 1960s which exposed the southern end of the alleyway of sphinxes linking Luxor and Karnak temples, also exposed hundreds of buried stone foundations made up of reused block fragments that had been torn off the upper walls of the temple. When the excavations were finished, the fragments were piled in dozens of rows around the temple for future analysis. From this pool of material, the Epigraphic Survey has identified over 1500 sandstone fragments from the Colonnade Hall alone, and is including them in the publication of the hall.

Each block fragment is drawn by the Chicago House team the same way a wall section would be drawn using photographic enlargements, and when the drawings are collated and finished, each fragment drawing is photographed (or scanned) so that scale prints of the drawings can be reassembled for the publication. Many of the fragments join like huge, stone jigsaw puzzles to form long strips or sections from numerous identifiable scenes, and augment considerably our understanding of the decorative scheme of the missing upper registers. Volume 1 in our Colonnade Hall series features joined fragment groups from the first register of the hall, the Opet reliefs. Volume 2 features joined fragments from the Colonnade Hall facade which preserve important information about its original decorative program, while Volume 3 in the series will be devoted primarily to the upper register fragment groups, one of which is over 75 feet long, and an architectural study of the hall.

In 1995 the Epigraphic Survey received another five-year grant from the Egyptian Antiquities Project, The United States Agency for International Development, The American Research Center in Egypt, and the Supreme Council of Antiquities for conservation and consolidation of the deteriorating decorated sandstone fragments in our Luxor temple blockyard, roughly 10%. Conservators John Stewart and Hiroko Kariya have supervised this project since its inception; John had actually worked on the material a decade before under former Chicago House Director Lanny Bell. In 1998 we erected an onsite conservation lab, which now allows greater control of the fragment treatment. Recently we received permission from the Supreme Council of Antiquities to expand our fragment documentation and conservation efforts at Luxor temple. We began by constructing new damp-coursed brick platforms east of the temple for the proper storage and treatment of the thousands of fragments that are still lying on the ground, to protect them against the rising damp. During the 1999-2000 season we constructed twenty more damp-coursed 'mastaba' platforms, and started to categorize, number, catalog, photograph, and move the blocks, starting in the south area, to their new home. During the 2001-2002 season, and thanks to a Robert Wilson matching grant and the World Monuments Fund, 310 meters of new storage and treatment brick mastaba/platforms were constructed for the decorated sandstone wall fragments presently stacked on the wet ground, and 5000 wall fragments were raised from the ground and placed on the new mastabas by category. Our eventual aim is to raise all of the fragmentary material around Luxor Temple up off the ground onto protected storage platforms, by category, for documentation, treatment, and eventual reconstruction.

Our second volume in the Luxor Temple series also includes a publication of the colossal statuary found in the Colonnade Hall, two great seated dyads in indurated limestone of Amun-Re and Mut, carved either by Tutankhamun or his successor Ay at the end of the 18th Dynasty, and a seated sculpture of a king from the same period. All of these sculptures were usurped by Ramesses II who erased the original names and replaced them with his own, greatly hindering our identification of the original king. Both dyads are missing the heads of the Mut-goddess figures, but we have had the good fortune recently to actually find the missing heads in the Egyptian Museum, Cairo, basement storage area where they had been waiting for over a century. Through the kindness of the Egyptian Museum and the Supreme Council for Antiquities the face of the large-dyad Mut goddess was transferred to Luxor where the Epigraphic Survey restored it to its body in January of 1997 (the restoration was supervised by conservator Ellen Pearlstein of the Brooklyn Museum).

CHICAGO HOUSE

Chicago House, the Oriental Institute headquarters in Egypt, functions as a major center of Egyptological studies and is open from October 15 through April 15 every winter season. The research library, among the finest in Egypt, has more than 18,000 volumes. The Chicago House photographic archive is a major research collection containing over 18,000 negatives and 20,000 prints ranging in date from the late-nineteenth century to the present. A project to conserve, register, and provide proper archival storage for the collection was recently completed and a catalog of the archival holdings, 'The Registry of the Photographic Archives of the Epigraphic Survey,' was published in 1995. In 1999 the Chicago House Imaging Center was formed to coordinate the scanning of the entire archive onto CD-ROM for inclusion in our Photo Archives database, and to coordinate experimentation with digital photography as an exciting new adjunct to our photographic documentation process.

The Epigraphic Survey is the flagship field project of the Oriental Institute and demonstrates a commitment to long term projects of the highest quality that benefit the entire field of ancient Near Eastern scholarship.

Partly funded by the University of Chicago and by a cultural endowment administered by the U.S. Embassy in Cairo, the Epigraphic Survey relies heavily on tax-deductible private and corporate support for its continued efforts to preserve the written heritage of ancient Egypt.

For further information on contributions to the work of the Survey, contact the Development Office at (773) 702-9513 or oi-membership@uchicago.edu

Visitors to Chicago House are always welcome, but please call the expedition in advance for the most convenient times for a visit, and remember that our field season is from October 15 to April 15. Weekday hours: Monday through Friday, 8:00 am to 12:00 noon, then 2:00 pm to 5:00 pm; Saturdays 8:00 to 12:00 noon; closed Saturday afternoons and Sundays. Direct dial from the U.S.: 011-20-95-237-2525; fax 011-20-95-238-1620. Or e-mail us at chicagohouse@menanet.net

From April 15 to October 15 the Survey is based at the University of Chicago in the USA; during that time please send inquiries to Dr. Ray Johnson at The Oriental Institute, 1155 East 58th Street, Chicago, Illinois 60637. Telephone: (773) 834-4355; fax: (773) 702-9853; e-mail: wr-johnson@uchicago.edu