The lecture was held at the Mummification Museum
on Sunday 27th January and attended by 129 persons.
Dr. Violeta started by an introduction on the site
history. The tomb in el-Khokha area and when the mission first introduced to the
site by Mr. Ibrahim Soliman in 1999, the tombs was in the middle of the village
and surrounded by houses.
The site was excavated by the Metropolitan Museum
mission between 1920-1929.
Neferhotep who was a high official of Karnak
and held the titles “Chief Scribe of Amun”. Neferhotep was a contemporary of Tut Ankh
Amun.
The tomb of Neferhotep (TT49) is a monument which
corresponds to a very important transition period in Egyptian history and its
relevance is that testifies to that process. Chronologically
is located in the immediate moment after Akhenaten's reform and the restoration
of the hegemony of Thebes. In
that process Neferhotep family must have stayed loyal to the opponents of
reform and then was revived in a prominent position. So
in his tomb represented the temple of Karnak. Their
god (Amun) was the chief of the imperial state and the dynasty, and the Temple
of Karnak was the most powerful institution in Egypt both economically and
politically at the time of opulence for Egypt.
The tomb’s entrance leads into a hall which
connects via a doorway to a pillared hall which contains four pillars. At the
back of the pillared hall a niche contains seated statues of Neferhotep and his
wife Iuy.
TT49
Conservation project is multidisciplinary and integrated approaches of
historical and archaeological monument.
When Dr. Violeta started in 1999; the mission plan
was to excavate the hall, chapel and passage. Also tests in the sloping passage
and funerary chamber beside the excavation of the ' Usurped ' burial.
After the houses were cleared, the mission started
in 2006 working on cleaning the entrance and the courtyard with a very important
point according to Dr. Violeta which is not to make a big intervention.
Another phase of the project is the survey of iconography
which will be published in Spanish.
Deterioration phenomena
- Crumbled rock / fractured
rock.
- Lost part of stone decoration.
- Consolidation of wall
paintings
- Stabilization of borders of the
plaster.
- Filling lost parts of well paintings.
The most interesting part of the conservation work
was done by the German conservative group associated with the project
implemented a methodology that brought up the visibility of the wall paintings
and reliefs, which were hidden by a thick layer of soot, using a combination of
mechanical, chemical and laser technology, the latter applied for the first
time in this type of monument and with excellent results.
.
.jpg){kind=small}
