Discovering a rare statue for the sun god Amun
Egypt, Culture, 7/8/1999

Egyptian Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni yesterday dropped the curtain on a statue of the sun god Amun Ra and his wife Mut whose age is 3,300 years.

The statue was reconstructed from pieces stored in several spots. In 1994, Dr. Hourigso Urouzian identified some of the fragments as belonging to the same statue, and the effort to restore the piece had begun.

The statue's first parts were found 130 years ago in Luxor while the rest of it was found in stages.

"The sculpture was broken up in the Middle ages by stone robbers who quarried away blocks from the statue's back slab and base and hollowed out a basin in the back of the throne. Ever since, different pieces of the statue had been excavated and subsequently sent to different storerooms," head of the Egyptian Supreme Council for Antiquities, Dr. Gaballah Ali Gaballah, added.

The statue is 4 meters high, 2 meters across, 2.5 meters deep, and was reformed by using 250 pieces, but it was not possible to compensate for the lost parts during the repairs for fear of changing the features of the statue.

"Each fragment was measured, drawn, photographed and recorded in files, before and during examination. After almost a century of storage they had suffered from heavy soiling and sulphation. All surfaces of the stone fragments were cleaned and then protected by applying a thin coating of microcrystaline wax. Once cleaned, the fragments were studied and brought together in groupings," Gaballah said.

He added that the pieces of the statue that were found had to be "supported by a frame-like structure within the original dimensions of the statue, allowing separate pieces to be supported with minimal intervention while remaining unobtrusive."

Previous Stories:
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