Thursday, February 28 was our last day of work. It has been a very satisfactory season. We accomplished most of what we set out to do, and more besides. Finding the footing of the Mut Temple’s 1st Pylon was particularly exciting, as was the successful restoration of Chapel D. We also found a new and interesting building in the last few days of work, described briefly below.
We want to give special thanks to the Luxor staff of Supreme Council of Antiquities who greatly facilitated our work: Mansour Boreik, General Manager for Upper Egypt; Mohamed Assem, General Manager for Luxor; Ibrahim Soliman, General Manager for Karnak; and our inspector Osama Abdel Maougoud Abdulla, with whom it was a great pleasure to work. And of course, nothing would have been possible without the hard work and dedication of our Egyptian technicians and workmen, to whom we owe many thanks.
Our most notable conservation project this season was the restoration of Chapel D. Here is the west wall of the first room in its final state. Its foundations are solid, its walls are vertical with the blocks properly aligned, and the spaces between the stones have been filled with a mortar tinted to match the sandstone. Khaled, Mohamed Gharib, Sayed Ahmed and their crew have done a wonderful job and we thank them for their efforts. (more…)
The final week on site was spent finishing up various small projects, catching up on treatment notes, and packing up the tools and supplies for next year. It was also satisfying to watch the progress on the west wall of Chapel D, pictured here, where Mohammed Gharib and Khaled did the final filling of losses between the original carved blocks with a mortar that closely matches the color of the stone when it dries.
My three weeks here at Mut have gone by fast and it’s been fascinating dealing with some of the problems conservators face in the field where the challenges range from preserving large scale stone and architectural elements to treating small excavated objects like coins and pottery. I’ve also made a lot of new friends and had the chance to see beautiful vistas everyday, like this one looking up the Avenue of Sphinxes toward the south entrance to the Karnak Temple complex. A special thanks to everyone who made it all possible!
After my second week on site I feel a bit less dazed and confused by the layout, the routine, and the scope and direction of the project, and more able to focus on the conservation issues at hand. A good thing considering I have less than a week remaining to finish out the season! I continued with the projects I described in my last entry including the removal of the cotton gauze facing from the badly deteriorated limestone block with Montuemhat’s name on it now that it’s been moved to a nearby mastaba for permanent display.
I continued to treat and clean coins as well but also had the pleasure of cleaning this small bronze lion, about five centimeters in length, with crossed forepaws. Pictured on the right, I’m cleaning the recently discovered relief fragment with an image of Khonsu on it to help make the incised lines more legible. (more…)
You are looking northwest at the Taharqa Gate late Thursday morning. We are now down to the paving in the whole gateway, except for a small area in the center of the west side. As is true throughout the site, the sandstone paving has been badly damaged by ground water over the years: the bright yellow sand used to be stone. The meter stick is sitting on a flat block set into and partially covered with mud brick that may be the earliest phase of the brick constructions that once blocked the gate. (more…)
My first day on site was Saturday, February 9th and I’m amazed at how quickly the week flew by. One of the things I did right away was walk around the entire precinct with Mary, who explained the layout and history of the excavation. It was great to actually walk around and locate features that I’ve only read about or seen in pictures. Richard, Bill, Elsie, Jaap and Ben have also been bringing me up to speed on various aspects of the site and sharing stories and anecdotes of seasons past.
In addition, I met my Egyptian colleagues for the first time including Khaled Mohamed Wassel, the Egyptian conservator on site who has been doing an admirable job of consolidating the carved sandstone blocks in the west wall of Chapel D, and supervising the master mason, Mohahamed Gharib and his team in rebuilding the wall. They’ve all been attempting to teach me a few words of Arabic with often humorous results.
I set about surveying my conservation supplies, and examined the small finds from this season, including a group of about forty coins. Pictured above is one of the first coins I cleaned mechanically with brushes and dental tools that shows the head of a Roman emperor yet to be identified. In the other picture I’m cleaning another coin with the pointed end of a wooden skewer after softening the outer layers of corrosion in a chemical solution of 10% EDTA (ethylene diamine tetra acetic acid) in water made basic with ammonia. Uncovering legible details on heavily corroded coins requires a steady hand and a lot of patience but if successful can aid in dating the area the coins were found in. (more…)
For the past several months, we’ve been working with filmmaker Matt Wolf on an upcoming video project. The video is in the final stages of editing, but I wanted to take a moment to write about the process. When we first met with Matt, he had the idea to do a rapid-fire combine of visitor portraits and objects in the collection. Because his vision was so closely tied to our mission (which considers the visitor experience paramount), we thought it might be an interesting twist if the collection photography used in piece was actually taken by our visitors.
We had been running a Brooklyn Museum Flickr group and had always been thrilled by the diversity and the quality of the shots that had been submitted to the group over the years. For the video, we selected 10 photographers who had been part of our Flickr community to participate by photographing areas of the permanent collection. Similar to our earlier Visitor Video Competition, one of the most interesting elements became how each photographer captured objects in a distinctly different way. As shots started to come in for review, I kept finding myself really looking at objects again and noticing how different the photography differed from our own. Objects that I see every day, took on new life and we hope these different takes will help show off the museum in a new way in the final video. (more…)
This week we moved a couple of teams of workmen from the Taharqa Gate (where working space is getting a little constricted) to the excavations north of Mut’s 1st Pylon. We now have teams working both on the structures built against the pylon face and in the area bounded on the north by the remains of Temple A’s columned porch and on the west by the Mut Temple’s East Porch. (more…)
Having launched in early November, we now have just over 1000 people using ArtShare on Facebook. I’m happy to say we’ve been joined by five other institutions (IMA, Met, Powerhouse, V&A, Walters) with a few more on the way soon. 174 artists are using ArtShare to share their own works. To date, institutions have uploaded 438 works from their collections and artists have uploaded 754.
Those are some of the straight stats, but it probably doesn’t tell the whole story. On Facebook, the highest traffic comes from browsing profiles, so exposure to the images may be significantly higher. For instance, if each ArtShare user has 20 friends, a lot more people could be seeing the images from ArtShare being shuffled on that profile. In a nut shell, 1000 people may have installed it, but a lot more may be seeing it and while this is not the kind of traffic we can measure, it is interesting to think about.
And on that note, one of the things I find most interesting are the works in ArtShare that are most interesting to our users. Here are the top 5 selected works. Keep in mind, these top 5 shift around a lot - this is the top 5 today, not the cumulative over time. Also note, 4 of the 6 institutions are new to ArtShare, so the Brooklyn Museum and V&A collections have received more exposure over time and that’s clearly being reflected here.
We’ve received a lot of great suggestions and have some thoughts of our own to make ArtShare even better. Over time, you should expect to see user interface changes and adjustments that will enable artists using the app to better share their own work. We’d also like to work in a general stats page within the application, so the basic numbers that we’ve reported here are always available to anyone using it. However, these changes must wait until after the Brooklyn Museum’s Spring exhibition cycle when we expect our workload to lighten just a bit. In the mean time, go check out the latest works that have been uploaded - there’s a lot to choose from now!
Clearing the Taharqa Gate is one of the season’s main goals, a goal we achieved, at least in part, this week: the north wing of the gate is visible from top to bottom, along with some of the ancient paving. On the left you are looking from the east end to the west. On the right, the arrow (indicating north) points at the original pivot for the gate’s door. The darker areas of stone were buried until this year. (more…)
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