Ashmolean Museum To Digitally Restore 3,000-Year-Old Shrine's Colors

(MENAFN- USA Art News) A 3,000-year-old shrine from northern Sudan, housed at Oxford's Ashmolean Museum, will soon display its original vibrant colors through a new digital projection. The Shrine of King Taharqa (690BC-654BC), the only freestanding pharaonic building in Britain, will be recolored digitally following extensive research into surviving pigment traces.

Microscopic analysis and hyperspectral imaging, which combines photography and spectroscopy, revealed evidence of previously invisible colors, including yellow and“Egyptian blue,” a pigment frequently used for depicting divine figures. Fragments of red paint also remain visible in the sandstone carvings' crevices.

The carvings and inscriptions on the shrine narrate its construction. Liam McNamara, the Ashmolean's keeper of antiquities, explained that a young Taharqa, who later became king of Kush in Nubia and Pharaoh of Egypt, encountered the ruins of an earlier brick temple to Amun-Re built by Tutankhamen, with“the sand drifted to its roof,” during his journey north toward Thebes. Taharqa reportedly vowed to restore it during his coronation and subsequently built the new shrine within a larger temple. Scorch marks on the shrine's stones, also identified during the project, indicate its eventual destruction.

Originally, the carved sandstone blocks were plastered and brightly painted. These depictions show Taharqa alongside the gods of Memphis, Heliopolis, and Amun-Re, portrayed as both a Theban and a local Gematen deity. Taharqa is depicted as an Egyptian pharaoh wearing the Double Crown of Upper and Lower Egypt in some scenes, and as a Kushite king with a ram's head, sun disc earrings, and a Kushite crown surmounted by two cobras in others.

The Shrine of King Taharqa arrived in Oxford 90 years ago in 150 crates, a gift from the Sudanese government to the Oxford University Excavations in Nubia, which had excavated it over several seasons in Khartoum. Nora Griffith donated it to the museum in 1936 in memory of her husband, Francis Llewellyn Griffith, who had led and largely funded the expeditions. Griffith, who taught himself Ancient Egyptian, became Oxford's first professor of Egyptology and a renowned scholar.

McNamara commented that the monument offers a fascinating look into the art and archaeology of ancient Sudan. He added,“The new projection, and the scientific research behind it, will allow visitors to appreciate and understand the shrine's original painted decoration like never before.”

The project received support from James Upton, chair of the Ashmolean's board of visitors, and his wife, Béatrice. The projection will be freely accessible to all visitors in the Ashmolean's Ancient Egypt and Sudan galleries beginning November 13.

Source: The Art Newspaper

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