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Experts from Egypt and Germany have completed the restoration of the ceiling of the Temple of Esna. Over a period of five years, 30 restorers led by Ahmed Emam removed dirt from several hundred figures with astronomical depictions and thus made them visible again in their original colours. “With the completion of the ceiling restoration, the project has reached its first and perhaps most important milestone,” said Professor Christian Leitz from the Institute for Ancient Oriental Cultures at the University of Tübingen: “In the coming years we want to primarily restore the interior walls of the pronaos as well as the remove soot from remaining columns”
The restoration of the Temple of Esna is a joint project of the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities and the University of Tübingen. On the Egyptian side, project management was in the hands of Dr. Hisham El Leithy. The colourful ceiling reliefs show deities, mythological figures and representations of the sun, moon, constellations and a wide variety of astronomical constellations. In addition to the colours, the restoration also revealed almost 200 ink inscriptions that were previously completely unknown. With their help, numerous representations were identified for the first time.
“The thematic breadth of the depictions underlines the great importance that astronomy had in ancient Egypt,” said the Tübingen Egyptologist Dr. Daniel von Recklinghausen. The blanket is divided into a total of seven sections that deal with different topics. These include, for example, the daily path of the sun, the phases of the moon, the different hours of the night or even New Year’s Day. “In the most recently uncovered section, the depiction of the deities Orion, Sothis and Anukis plays an important role,” explained von Recklinghausen.
Orion represents the constellation of the same name. Next to him is Sothis, which is the ancient Egyptian name for the constellation Sirius. “Sirius is invisible in the starry sky for 70 days during the year until it rises again in the east,” explained Leitz: “This point in time was New Year’s Day in ancient Egypt and also announced the beginning of the annual flooding of the Nile.” The third goddess Anukis understood the Egyptians, on the other hand, were responsible for the decline of the Nile flood around 100 days later.
With the restoration now completed, Egypt now has two outstandingly preserved astronomical ceilings in temples. One is in the temple of Dendara around 60 kilometers north of Luxor, where the dominant colours are white and light blue. In the temple of Esna, the themes are partly similar, but the colours are completely different; the dominant colours here are primarily yellow and red. The work in Esna was funded by the Ancient Egypt Foundation, the American Research Center in Egypt and Gerda-Henkel -Foundation, endowment.
Of the temple in Esna, 60 kilometers south of Luxor in Egypt, only the vestibule (the so-called pronaos) remains, but it is complete: with a length of 37 meters, a width of 20 meters and a height of 15 meters, the sandstone building was built at the latest under the Roman Emperor Claudius (41–54 AD) was placed in front of the actual temple building and may have dwarfed it. The location in the middle of the city center probably contributed to the fact that the vestibule was preserved and was not used as a quarry for building materials like other buildings during Egypt’s industrialization. Even during Napoleon’s time, the Pronaos attracted a lot of attention among experts because it was viewed as an ideal example of ancient Egyptian temple architecture.
