University’s Effort to Record Details of Ancient Egypt Dates to 1924 : After 61 Years, Luxor Expedition Is Still Going Strong

In 1924, a University of Chicago expedition arrived in Luxor with what seemed a simple mission: to record for posterity the carvings and paintings of ancient temples that were slowly being destroyed by climatic conditions, neglect and tourism.

Today, 61 years and 15 published volumes later, the university expedition is still hard at work, recording everything in painstaking detail and, in the process, increasing the world’s understanding of ancient Egypt.

The expedition, which includes artists, photographers and epigraphists, has been able to recover whole texts from walls that seemed to be hopelessly damaged. This has shed new light on the relationships that particular pharaoh had with various gods, on the rulers’ policies toward neighboring peoples and on their forebears.

King Tut’s Brother

The Chicago team has learned, for example, that Kings Tutankhamen and Akhenaten were full brothers, not half brothers or father and son, as originally believed. They have determined that the magnificent Luxor Temple was built to confirm Amenhotep III’s divinity and to justify his right to reign. And they have tracked the route of the procession preceding the monthlong Festival of Opet, more than 3,000 years ago.

Ray Johnson, the senior artist, has re-created pictorially a 70-foot frieze that Tutankhamen put up at Luxor. Working with a team of Egyptologists, Johnson used the few available fragments from the original frieze to piece together the obliterated scene. The process requires a knowledge of ancient writing, artistic conventions and the relationship between scenes.

The laborious process, he said, is a bit like figuring out a jigsaw puzzle, but Egyptologists, with their specialized knowledge, can often make a precise reconstruction.

Archeological Treasures

Luxor, not far from the ancient city of Thebes, contains Egypt’s greatest collection of archeological treasures, including the Valley of the Kings and Tutankhamen’s burial chamber. Many of them are deteriorating because of vandalism and climatic and soil changes caused by the construction of the dam at Aswan.

“Everyone is aware of the magnitude of the problem,” said Lanny Bell, director of the expedition since 1977, “and everyone is trying to do something about it. But I’m afraid in another 200 years there won’t be much left to look at in Luxor.”

It is for this reason that the epigraphic survey, run by the University of Chicago’s Oriental Institute, is documenting the monuments in volumes of drawings that will serve as the definitive reference work for future scholars.

Gathering Spot for Scholars

The expedition, founded by the late James Henry Breasted, the Egyptologist, has its headquarters in a rambling, 54-year-old villa known as Chicago House. With its 14,000-volume library, the house has become a gathering spot for scholars from throughout the world during the archeological season here, which lasts from October to May.

The survey, which this year includes 13 Americans and 22 Egyptians, interrupted its operations only during World War II.

Sixty percent of its annual $247,000 budget comes from the University of Chicago. Supplemental funds have been provided by the U.S. government through a reserve accumulated from grain sales dating back to the 1950s, but those funds have dwindled recently and are being used to construct a new U.S. Embassy in Cairo.