Archeologists Uncovered Magnificent Ancient Egyptian Art—Once They Cleaned Off Centuries Worth of Bird Poop
Whenever one imagines the life of an archeologist, they tend to picture someone discovering some remarkable artifact after clearing away dirt, sand, or debris. Perhaps they even envision some assemblage of overgrowth obscuring a remarkable work of ancient art.
What’s probably never imagined is having to clear away centuries of bird poop.
Yes, the same challenge that faces most of us when we leave our cars parked under a tree for too long also faced a team of dedicated researchers from the Julius Maximilian University of Würzburg in Germany.
They were undertaking a restoration of the Temple of Edfu—a 115-foot-tall, 250-foot-wide temple located in Egypt’s Southern Nile Valley on the west bank of the region’s eponymous river. Built and decorated to honor the god Horus over the 180 year span from 237 to 57 B.C., the Temple of Edfu, Newsweek notes, is “considered to be the best-preserved sanctuary of ancient Egypt.”
“Today the temple’s importance is that it is almost completely preserved,” Martin Stadler remarked to Newsweek. Stadler, the chair of Egyptology at the University of Würzburg, worked with colleagues from the university and Egyptian restorers from the country’s Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities to try and gain a better understanding of the temple and its history through, among other things, giving it a good cleaning.
The restoration effort, Newsweek notes, “involved cleaning off the reliefs that were covered with dust, bird droppings, and other dirt that has accumulated since the temple’s excavation in 1860.” And what the restoration team ultimately found beneath the centuries of debris shed new light on the temple’s original appearance. Once they cleared the detritus away, the team found “traces of gold leaf, colorful painting remnants, and graffiti.”
“The coloration of the Horus-Temple of Edfu has never been subject of Egyptological study and is still largely unknown today,” Sadler noted. “Therefore, we are missing an important facet of the temple needed to fully understand it. The rediscovery of the multicolored temples of Egypt will revolutionize the impression of the sanctuaries, which currently appear mostly as brownish-beige monoliths that hardly stand out against the background of the desert landscape.”
The Temple of Edfu in particular is a remarkable example of just how important coloration can be in understanding the full grandeur of these ancient structures. Sadler noted that the “complex system of inscriptions and pictorial reliefs that cover the walls” actually intertwine to depict a grandiose image of the cosmos “according to Egyptian ideals.”
Thanks to what’s been uncovered, researchers can now attain a better understanding of how these intricate designs were intended to be seen millennia ago—in vivid color.
“Revealing the temple’s polychromy helps us to understand better the iconography of the reliefs and hieroglyphic inscriptions that fully cover the walls,” Sadler stated in a press release. “Thus, restoration is for Egyptologists not just a matter of aesthetics but a sort of micro-excavation that reveals further information on the ancient Egyptian picture language.”
So, in the end, the world has gained more than just a better understanding of one of Egypt’s most well-preserved ancient temples. It’s also gained a much better way to talk about one of life’s most tedious tasks: you’re not just cleaning bird poop off the family car anymore, you’re “micro-excavating the hood ornament of your Hyundai Equus.”
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