Today, remains of this vast complex include the colossal Great Colonnade Hall, almost 61 meters long, with 28 twenty-one-foot-high columns, its decoration largely undertaken by Tutankhamun around B.
After excavation, exposure to changes in humidity mobilized these salts and accelerated deterioration. Over 1, deteriorating blocks and inscribed wall fragments underwent consolidation and treatment, which arrested their decay and allowed for early stages of reconstruction.
An outer section of the eastern wall of the Colonnade Hall was stabilized with a brick buttress concealed with sandstone slabs in order to blend into the original stone of the temple. Watch Live. Luxor discovery: 'Ancient Egypt's Pompeii' found as archaeologists uncover 3,year-old 'lost golden city' Experts describe the site as "ancient Egypt's Pompeii" due to how well it has been preserved - despite lying unseen for centuries.
Fill 2 Copy 11 Created with Sketch. Friday 9 April , UK. Why you can trust Sky News. Instead, they uncovered something very different: zigzagging mudbrick walls up to nine feet high and piles of ancient artifacts from the era of Amenhotep III. There are homes where workers might have lived, a bakery and kitchen, items related to metal and glass production, buildings that appear related to administration, and even a cemetery filled with rock-cut tombs.
Though the size of the city has yet to be determined, its date is clear thanks to hieroglyphics on a variety of items.
She recalls walking through the preserved streets, surrounded by tall walls where, she says, she expected an ancient Egyptian to come around the corner at any moment. The city appears to have been reused by Tutankhamun, who ditched Akhetaten during his reign but established a new capital at Memphis.
Four distinct settlement layers at the site show eras of use all the way into the Coptic Byzantine era of the third through seventh centuries A.
But why was it abandoned during the brief reign of Akhenaten? All rights reserved. Share Tweet Email. Why it's so hard to treat pain in infants. This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city. Animals Wild Cities This wild African cat has adapted to life in a big city Caracals have learned to hunt around the urban edges of Cape Town, though the predator faces many threats, such as getting hit by cars.
India bets its energy future on solar—in ways both small and big. First, she convinced the World Monuments Fund in to designate the temple one of the world's " Most Endangered Sites" and fund the initial conservation area of the shattered fragments aboveground.
During the course of that effort, Sourouzian began to suspect that there was more to be found underground. By , however, the money had run out, and she and Stadelmann reluctantly began to wrap up their work. But a wealthy French woman who had attended a lecture by Sourouzian in Paris agreed to fund a more ambitious excavation.
Within a year, the team began to uncover their first statues, and the archaeologists realized that many treasures still lay beneath the dirt. Born in Baghdad to parents of Armenian descent, Sourouzian grew up in Beirut and studied art history at the Sorbonne in Paris. Sent to Karnak by the Louvre, she became one of the leading authorities on Egyptian royal statuary. Now, along with Stadelmann, who once headed the German Archaeological Institute in Cairo, Sourouzian orchestrates a team of two dozen specialists from around the world—including French, Swiss, German, Spanish and Japanese researchers—and as many as local workers.
What began modestly has become one of the most ambitious projects Egypt has seen in decades, bringing to light a triumph of engineering and art that once dwarfed even the massive Karnak and Luxor temples across the Nile. Amenhotep III called the complex "a fortress of eternity out of good white sandstone—worked with gold throughout. Its floors were purified with silver, all of its doorways were of electrum," an alloy of gold and silver.
The recently liberated Sekhmet statue is one of 72 of the goddess that Sourouzian and her team have discovered. They've also found two huge statues of Amenhotep III, each flanked by a smaller one of Queen Tye and a menagerie of sacred animals, including an alabaster hippopotamus.
The project is giving Egyptologists a fresh look at the mysterious temple culture that dominated ancient life here, in which hordes of priests conducted rituals, made offerings and administered the intricate rites designed to ensure the eternal well-being of the dead pharaoh.
Once brightly painted in blues, reds, greens, yellows and whites, the foot colossi in front of the massive first gate, or pylon, loomed over the Nile Valley's flat farmland, facing the brown river that then flowed just a few hundred yards away.
While the rest of the complex collapsed and crumbled, the stately statues remained. Cracks caused by an earthquake in 27 B. A contemporary named Pausanias described the sound in his Guide to Greece as "very like the twang of a broken lyre-string or a broken harp-string. Alas, it was inadvertently silenced during restoration work in A.
On a hot morning, visiting American archaeologists and art conservators spill out of a crowded van. Sourouzian leads them into a storeroom the length of a railroad car, and the visitors marvel at the Sekhmets, a giant head of the pharaoh, and bits and pieces of unidentified faces in neat rows—fresh finds from Sourouzian's team.
Few building sprees in history can match that of Amenhotep III, and few pharaohs' lives are so well documented—even his birth is commemorated in stone reliefs at Luxor.
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