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Friday, January 23, 2015

Phil as the scribe.   Hieroglyphic representation of the small finds litany.   
Small finds notebook with litany.

Although we will keep posting until our skeletons have been removed, this will be the final entry with our great undergraduate students present. We wish them a great spring term! Thanks to them for their hard work and wonderful attitude -- Phil, Allie, and Luke. Here is our send-off to Phil who left yesterday. He loves ancient Egyptian language and for our final party he acted as scribe to write the Small Finds Litany (see Hopkins in Egypt Today June 25, 2014) in hieroglyphs on a papyrus. The rest of the team then signed it, and it was presented to me at the party. Thanks everyone! Here is Phil in his scribal mode.


Our final outing is to Abydos and Dendera, with only Allie, Luke, and Marina. Meg is leaving today but just not enough time for her to get back for her plane to Cairo.

Allie, Luke, and Marina.
Temple at Abydos.

Mut suckling Seti I.   Sakhmet offering the menat necklace.

A few carefully chosen relief images from the exquisite sculpture of Seti I’s Abydos temple: with deliberate thought for our work and our colleagues: first, Mut herself suckling Seti I as child, then Sakhmet (Mut’s alterego) offering the menat necklace (in Meredith’s memory) to Seti, then Thoth, a paean to Dr. Jasnow. The last is just such an over-the-top crown that I could not resist. For a more serious visit to the temple, see some of our many postings in the Archives!

Thoth.   Note the over-the-top-crown.

Outside we visit the Osireion briefly and view a bit of the antechamber to the cenotaph where Horus stands before a seated Osiris and the texts are parts of the Book of the Dead. This scene ended the long subterranean south-running passage that contained vignettes from the Book of Gates. At this point the rooms turn 90 degrees eastward toward the sarcophagus chamber. The Osireion.
View of the antechamber to the cenotaph where Horus stands before a seated Osiris and the texts are parts of the Book of the Dead.

At Dendura.
Soon thereafter we left for Dendera and had a great visit there. The hypostyle hall which was cleaned some few years ago remains splendid with its Hathoric columns and colorful astronomical ceiling decoration. Hypostyle hall at Dendura.
Ceiling decoration.

Marina emerting from the crypt.

No surprise that the students wanted to explore all the ups and downs possible, so we see Marina emerging from the crypt, all three of them in the fascinating upper room inside the great face of Hathor visible from the exterior of the temple, and Allie descending again from there.

Luke, Marina, and Allie in the upper room.
Allie descending from the upper room.

On the roof.

Up on the roof we get an action shot with Luke praising the sun god and anticipating an energizing moment in the kiosk. Apparently Osiris had the same idea, as we see him in a skylight awaiting the rejuvenating rays of the sun. A last image of the three on the roof, and for a bit of amusement, here’s a wonderful Roman era hieroglyph that Marina saw as we walked around the perimeter. The elephant carrying the tiny god – now who said that the Egyptian culture was static?

Relief of Osiris in the skylight.
Luke, Allie, Marina.
Roman era hieroglyph showing elephant.

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