Amenhotep III & sun god Re-Horakhti statue unearthed at pharaoh's funerary temple in Luxor

Heritage Key ^ | Thursday, November 4, 2010 | Ann Wuyts

[SunkenCiv]

Archaeologists today discovered the upper portion of a statue of Egyptian Pharaoh Amenhotep III at Luxor, Egypt.

The find -- part of a double statue featuring King Amenhotep III with the falcon-headed sun god Re-Horakhti -- was made at the pharaoh's funerary temple, located on the west bank of the Nile.

In a press statement, Egypt's Minister of Culture, Farouk Hosny said that the discovery was made during routine excavations at Amenhotep III's mortuary temple carried out by the Supreme Council of Antiquities (SCA)...

Previously, the SCA mission already unearthed a double statue of the pharoah and the god Amun, several sculptures depicting the king with solar god Amun-Re and an unique granite colossus, depicting the god of wisdom Thoth in the form of a baboon...

So far, more than 80 statues of the goddess have been unearthed by the Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project, directed by Dr. Hourig Sourouzian (watch the video about the project on the left).

It has been suggested that the Sekhmet statues were erected because Amenhotep's failing health during the final years of his reign.

A number of group statues of Amenhotep III are still partially buried under private the farmland surrounding the temple. The government and the SCA are now trying to reach an agreement with the landowner to purchase the section so the statues can be fully excavated...

Amenhotep III's funerary temple -- famous for its Colossi of Memnon -- was built closer to the Nile than any other temple in Thebes, right on the edge of the floodplain. Consequently, less than 200 years after the pharaoh's reign, it had almost completely collapsed, with most of its stones being removed from the site to be reused in other construction projects.

[AdmSmith]

“That’s a LONG face!”

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marfan’s_syndrome