Researchers Save Face for Statue of Goddess

While toiling in the shadow of a faceless statue amid the ruins of the Luxor Temple, a group of American Egyptologists received a request from a German scholar 300 miles up the Nile in Cairo.

Could they possibly identify a photograph of a large limestone face that had been gathering dust for nearly 100 years in the basement of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo?

Eureka!

“These fragments we realized instantly belonged to this statue,” said Peter Dorman, who heads a team of University of Chicago Egyptologists working in the ancient Egyptian city of Luxor.

Richard Fazzini could not believe their luck.

“It’s not that it’s never happened before, but for two scattered fragments to be recognized as joining and then to actually have them joined is a rare occurrence,” said Fazzini, chairman of the Brooklyn Museum’s department of Egyptian, classical and ancient Middle Eastern art.

The face and statue are that of the goddess Mut (pronounced moot), a consort of the official god of the Egyptian empire, Amun.

Mut, which means mother in ancient Egyptian, represented the maternal aspect of divinity.

The statue, about double the size of a real woman, was erected at Luxor Temple 3,300 years ago. At the time, the temple was used by kings and priests for two-week celebrations of renewal and rejuvenation every summer.

A dowel mark on the statue’s forehead indicates the face fell off centuries ago. It was reattached, but fell off again in the 7th or 8th century A.D.

Then at the turn of this century the face wound up in the Cairo museum, where it sat until German scholar Hourig Sourouzian, who was conducting studies at the museum, took a shot on the Americans helping her out.

Because of her query, the face and statue will be reunited after at least a 1,200-year separation.

“We were very fortunate,” Dorman said. “What is interesting is we have the possibility to reunite a piece with a sculpture in the same place where it’s been for hundreds of years or more.”