The dump of rubble and artifacts in the Middle Kingdom tomb.Image credit: PCMA UW
Posted on 01/04/2022 8:51:49 PM PST by SunkenCiv
An ancient Egyptian "garbage dump" discovered within a temple honoring the powerful female Pharaoh Hatshepsut is piled high with offerings to a fertility goddess, archaeologists report.
Archaeologists unexpectedly found the rubbish heap in a tomb within the 3,500-year-old Hathor cult complex, a three-temple complex that sits within the Hatshepsut Temple at Deir el-Bahari (also spelled Deir el-Bahri), near Luxor. Even though the dump was hidden in an early Middle Kingdom tomb, many of the artifacts in the dump date to the New Kingdom, which includes the 18th, 19th and 20th dynasties...
Many of these artifacts are votive offerings — special objects, like figurines, purposefully left for deities, religious leaders or establishments — that people in ancient Egypt gave to Hathor, the goddess of fertility...
Chudzik's team discovered the Middle Kingdom tomb with the rubbish heap in spring of 2021, while investigating the Hathor cult complex, and working to conserve and reconstruct it, especially for its public opening to the Hathor Shrine...
The garbage dump is huge, he noted. The debris fills the tomb's roughly 50-foot-long (15 meters) corridor, with its highest point at 1.6 feet (0.5 m). Despite the dump's size, other archaeologists have missed its importance. Swiss archaeologist Édouard Naville originally discovered the tomb in the late 1800s, but beyond noting the excessive rubble, he didn't investigate the garbage dump, according to Science in Poland, a Polish news website jointly run by independent media and the government. An American expedition excavating the temple in the 1920s also skipped over the deposit.
The new investigation found the votive offerings to Hathor include glazed ceramic, known as faience, and clay vessels; clay cow figurines; fragments of limestone and granite statues; small faience female figurines that are representations of Hathor; and various types of amulets.
(Excerpt) Read more at livescience.com ...
The dump of rubble and artifacts in the Middle Kingdom tomb.Image credit: PCMA UW
Was she related to Hotsy Totsy?
One of the Middle Kingdom Pharaohs, Mentuhotep II, built his mortuary temple at Deir el Bahari, and for some reason Hatshepsut had an interest in that earlier era, and built hers right next to (in this photo, to the right of) his centuries later.
The Mortuary Temple of Mentuhotep II, is an ancient mortuary temple of Ancient Egypt, built for Mentuhotep II, the Eleventh Dynasty king who reunited Egypt at the beginning of the Middle Kingdom. This temple was Mentuhotep II's most ambitious and innovative building project.
Also known as the Akh-sut-Amun (Ancient Egyptian: 3ḫ-swt-Jmn "Transfigured are the places of Amun"), the Mortuary Temple of Mentuhotep Nebhepetre, marks a break with the Old Kingdom tradition of pyramid complexes and foreshadows the Temples of Millions of Years of the New Kingdom. As such, Mentuhotep II's temple was certainly a major source of inspiration for the nearby, but 550-year later temple of Hatshepsut and the temple of Thutmose III.
However, the most profound innovations of Mentuhotep II's temple are not architectural but religious. First, it is the earliest mortuary temple where the king is not just the recipient of offerings but rather enacts ceremonies for the deities (in this case Amun-Ra). Second, the temple identifies the king with Osiris. Indeed, the decoration and royal statuary of the temple emphasizes the Osirian aspects of the dead ruler, an ideology apparent in the funerary statuary of many later pharaohs.
Finally, most of the temple decoration is the work of local Theban artists. This is evidenced by the dominant artistic style of the temple which represents people with large lips and eyes and thin bodies. At the opposite, the refined chapels of Mentuhotep II's wives are certainly due to Memphite craftsmen who were heavily influenced by the standards and conventions of the Old Kingdom. This phenomenon of fragmentation of the artistic styles is observed throughout the First Intermediate Period and is a direct consequence of the political fragmentation of the country.Mortuary Temple of Mentuhotep II -- Madain Project
Until very recent times, people WANTED children.
Don’t touch the socks…
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