PublicVR Forum

Here are line drawing images from Sylvie Cauville's work on Dendera, a Greco-Roman temple, entitled "Le temple de Dendera : guide archéologique"

They show different offering scenes involving the Pharaoh and a number of deities - most notably Hathor and Horus, and their son Harsomtus.

There are more scenes like this if you would like more, let me know. The scenes tend to be very similar, though. Typically the offering scenes are organized in pairs with the scenes across from it (east-west first register, east-west second register, etc) by their associated rituals.

Orientation
Edfu in particular is oriented along a North-South axis rather than the traditional East-West axis of New Kingdom temples. The back of the shrine would be facing the south, the mouth to the north, the right of the shrine walking up to it would thus be west and the left east.

However, the scenes to a certain degree are interchangeable. The east-west walls in particular play off each other and there is not a strict guide to which ritual scenes are applied to the east side versus the west side; we know this because we find slight differences between the temples of Edfu and Dendera which were both built around the same time within 110 miles of each other.

Are these textures for the sanctuary or the Shrine?

We need to texture back and sides of the shrine. Specifically, we need to know exactly what hieroglyphics to put there and in what arrangement. The dimensions of the current shrine have each side/back twice as tall as it is wide, a rectangle standing on its short side.

Are the current decorations on the front of the shrine correct or do they need to be replaced? If so, with what? If you wish, I can draw some cutout areas for you to fill in. We need this before next Monday, if possible.

I am having problems with the uploading of new images for some reason so I have emailed them to Jeff.

The images are the hieroglyphs written out for the line drawings. All of these images are from the first column of the West wall; register 1 is the horizontal level closest to the floor. Register 2 is the middle horizontal row, and Register 3 is the top most horizontal row - but again only within the first column. In my image of the East wall there is an arrow pointing to the column in question.

These are the only hieroglyphs I have for now and they only refer to the first column. There is a lot of repetition though within the King's title, etc which can be applied accurately to all the scenes. I do not know if you can fit all these hieroglyphs into the model if you wanted people to be able to read them as well.

I will work towards finding the rest of the hieroglyphs though for the other panels.

The actual orientation of the temple to the points of the compass is irrelevant because the temple decoration is always oriented along its central axis. The images found in Ptolemaic temples are typically like this, quite busy and depict the daily cult as as well as the contents of the sanctuary like boats. Cauville's guide is quite recent but Chassinat's original publication is outside of copyright and could be used.

The last scene reproduced in your message is not inside the sanctuary but on the inner side of the wall surrounding it. It represented the famous "Triumph of Horus,' thought by many to be an actual drama.

Berenike

Could these wall decorations of the sanctuary be turned into wall paper? They are quite repetitive.

Berenike

These are two of the images Julia was not able to post, earlier. I had to trim and compress them a bit. The other two image files are damaged.

These last images cannot be used because they do not show actual wall decoration but reproduce the texts in hieroglyphic font with indications of where they are to be found on the wall. This was done because in the inscriptions are not easily legible in the photographs. This is not a concern for us as well are more interested in large, easily legible images that can be used as wall decoration.

Berenike

Are you saying we can or cannot use these? As you point out, we are interested in large, legible, hieroglyphs. I think we would use them mainly to complete damage inscriptions.

Here are a bunch of images Berenke found for the shrine, a while back. It's all too dense for us to use directly, but maybe bits of it would make sense. What book do these come from, again?

http://publicvr.org/blogImages/ShrineBits/plate1.jpg
http://publicvr.org/blogImages/ShrineBits/plate2.jpg
http://publicvr.org/blogImages/ShrineBits/plate3.jpg
http://publicvr.org/blogImages/ShrineBits/plate4.jpg
http://publicvr.org/blogImages/ShrineBits/plate5.jpg
http://publicvr.org/blogImages/ShrineBits/plate6.jpg