The Royal Mortuary Cult Complex in the Temple of Hatshepsut at Deir el-Bahari. Part I

The volume is an <i>editio princeps</i> of the Chapel of Thutmosis I, a
shrine located in the southern part of the upper terrace of the Theban
funerary complex of Hatshepsut. The shrine was built by order of the
queen to commemorate her father and housed the pharaoh’s mortuary cult
in relation to that celebrated for the queen in the adjoining Chapel of
Hatshepsut. Its decoration, patterned upon that of the Chapel of
Hatshepsut, although significantly smaller in scale, follows
iconographic schemes in vogue from the illustrious era of the Old
Kingdom and the pyramid temples of the great pharaohs of more than a
thousand years earlier.
Forgotten and completely demolished after
the mortuary cults ceased to be celebrated in the royal temples at Deir
el-Bahari, the chapel has been mostly inaccessible until now. It has now
been studied and a reconstruction of its fragmented decoration has been
proposed, linking the preserved remains and the separate blocks and
fragments painstakingly positioned above them, to aid in a visual
identification of what is in situ and what is not. An exhaustive
architectural analysis appended to the volume, including axonometric
views, places the decoration in the context of the temple and its
building history.

“This publication is the culmination of
many years of painstaking excavation, documentation, and restoration
work at Deir el-Bahari, not to mention some sharp detective work outside
of Egypt in the identification of fragmentary material. a major
achievement and will be an outstanding contribution to Egyptology.”
(Raymond W. Johnson, University of Chicago, Oriental Institute).