The Creation of a Primary Text:
The Temple of Hatshepsut

May 16, 2006

The Temple of Hatshepsut is nestled into a bay of cliffs. It is a rare monument that manages to both accentuate the surrounding landscape and yet remain a wholly individual structure. The temple gently stands out, adding a hint of human (or divine) order to the rough desert. I was struck on this visit by how non-martial this temple is.. especially in comparison with the temple down the way, Medinet Habu.. where the pictorial details portray Ramesses III routing enemies and braining them with a club. The Temple of Hatshepsut, alternatively, portrays a journey to the land of Punt, and the bringing back of exotic spoils.. and everything from exotic trees to lion skins to a living giraffe find a place among the carvings on the wall.

In its perfection the temple seems to have simply stood here for the past 3500 years.. with a few breakages here and there, of course. But this would be to misunderstand the history of this monument. The temple often gets referred to as Deir al-Bahri.. and since "Deir" is the Arabic word for a monastery, it is no mystery what was here before the end of the 19th century when some careful reconstruction took place. The date for this reconstruction is noted on a stone inset into the middle of a ramp.

This same ramp, viewed from the opposite side, gives a clear visual measure for how much reconstruction has gone into this architectural gem. The new stones stand out clearly on top of the ancient stones.. which may or may not have been in the correct position when found.

It would be interesting to compute the percentage of original to reconstructed materials. With practically every column it is possible to glimpse the work of archeologists working to fit the puzzle pieces of ruins together into some coherent whole. In the picture below the fragments from the head of Osiris are places on pedestals, allowing the visitor to conceive that once every column was fronted by a large statue of Osiris.

With respect to the representations on the walls, sometimes the pictures are cemented together seamlessly:

Other times a considerable amount of ingenuity has gone into figuring out how diverse fragments go together. In at least one case the archeologists have even taken a few scattered clues and taken the liberty to draw in the way they believe the figures must have looked. (The following fragment is from the upper level which I believe to have been completed later than the other parts.)

The visitor is confronted with a masterpiece in the Temple of Hatshepsut.. but it is a masterpiece which is obviously heavily reconstructed.. and even re-imagined. And it seems to me that this is an unsung aspect of scholarship: it does not simply comment on primary texts, but often it creates primary texts. Everything that is present on the ground in stone at Deir al-Bahri could have been theoretically drawn out on paper.. and this masterpiece would then have lived in books accessed by Egyptologists. Articles would have been written, and papers delivered. In this case, however, they have delivered up a complete text..

This kind of careful recreation is no easy task. It involves being able to think after the original creators.. and to connect design features into a single structure. This kind of scholarship is intensely creative.. and its results are obvious.

If I were to write out an academic program, this kind of re-creation would be high on my list.. Not only to generate secondary comments, but to deliver primary texts that are new, but feel to everyone as if they have been around for centuries.