The Hypostyle Hall Project's Work at Karnak

After leaving Chicago House in the mid 1980s, William Murnane became a professor of history at the University of Memphis (formerly called Memphis State University) and adjunct professor of the university's Institute of Egyptian Art and Archaeology. It was from this post that he launched the Karnak Hypostyle Hall Project in 1990. The task facing him was daunting. A huge share of the Hall's inscriptions had never been recorded or studied in any fashion and despite important studies by a number of scholars, including Murnane himself, much about the building's history and function was poorly understood.

The goals of the project are threefold.

• (1) to make a complete scientific record of the of the Great Hypostyle Hall at Karnak, especially its reliefs and inscriptions

• (2) to use these copies as the basis of an investigation into the religious purposes for which the hall was built and the historical circumstances which are reflected in it. Work on the first goal inevitably contributes to the second. Our fieldwork and research continues to shed light on the history of ancient Egypt as well as the religious mentality and practices of its state religion.

• (3) where possible, the Project as undertook the physical conservation of the relief decoration of the Hypostyle Hall which are endangered by the infiltration of salt laden groundwater. Since 1990, our work has focused on four main parts of the Hypostyle Hall. We began our epigraphic work in the early 1990s by recording scenes in the various gateways of the Hall, especially the Passageway of the Second Pylon which is also the western gateway or "front door" of the Hall. Fieldwork on this phase of the project was completed by 1997 and a manuscript is now being readied for publication. In 1995 recording of the war scenes of Ramesses II on the south exterior wall began and is still ongoing. These reliefs are badly eroded, a fact which discouraged earlier scholars from serious work on them, but our effort has paid off. Ramesses II's war record is actually a palimpsest, consisting of two sets of battle scenes superimposed one atop the other. Since his Chicago House days, the late William J. Murnane had been working on a vast jigsaw puzzle— more than 200 inscribed stone blocks and fragments that once graced the upper walls of the Hypostyle Hall but which have long since tumbled from these heights and now lie in the fields around Karnak temple. This phase of the project had lain dormant for some time, but was revived in our 2000 field season. A key part of this undertaking was the physical conservation of blocks that had lain on the ground for a decades suffering damage from groundwater and salt infiltration and even from the weeds growing among them.

• (4)    The fourth phase of this project incorporates salvage epigraphy, an issue which began at the turn of the Millennium. Due to the ongoing and rapidly accelerating decay of many of the Hypostyle Hall's reliefs and inscriptions, especially on the lowest courses of the walls, we began to record reliefs not only based on the logical basis of where they were located and what group of scenes they were part of, but on the immediate threat of their partial or complete destruction through salt damage. In 2000, battle reliefs of Ramesses II along the base of the south exterior wall were recorded first, leaving those on the upper registers for later seasons, even though this was not the most efficient way of using our six story aluminum scaffolding. The point was that the scenes on the base of the wall were actively decaying, those further up were not. In 2001, salvage epigraphy also began inside the Hall, were selected reliefs of Ramesses II at the base of the west wall were recorded even though these had been published in the Nelson volume. The difference was that these new drawings were facsimiles of much higher quality and detail. Although many reliefs in the Hall have never been published, the immediate threat to the scenes on the base of the west wall meant that we had to act right away. Eventually, all of the interior wall reliefs will be republished as high quality facsimiles, but in the mean time, our first priority are the most endangered reliefs and those that remain wholly unpublished.