Talatat

Talatat with Akhenaten and a daughter sacrificing to Aton (Brooklyn Museum)

The talatat (also called telatat) are the typical stone blocks from which the temples and buildings were built in the Amarna period in ancient Egypt . The name comes from the Arabic talatât , which means "threesome" and was used by the workers when uncovering the blocks.

use

The talatat were specific building material for the Amarna period . They have a standardized size of about 27 × 27 × 54 cm (i.e. ½ × ½ × 1 Egyptian cubit ). The comparatively small size facilitated the quick construction of temples and buildings, but also an equally quick, later demolition of these structures. The talatat were later a sought-after building material, especially for foundations and fillings of double-shell walls and temple pylons . In this way they escaped the later stone robbers and a large number of these blocks have been preserved.

discovery

Restored Talatat blocks from the Gem-pa-Aton ( Luxor Museum )

The largest find complexes of this Talatat originally come from the Aton temples of Karnak (from the first years of Akhenaten's reign ) and Achet-Aton , today's Tell el-Amarna. The majority of the blocks from Tell el-Amarna were brought to Hermopolis on the opposite bank of the Nile in the post-Amarna period. There, 1500 of them were rediscovered during the German excavations, which were carried out between 1929 and 1939 under the direction of the Hildesheim museum director Günther Roeder , in the foundations of a temple for the god Thoth built in the time of Ramses II . Since the excavation team was unable to completely excavate the site of the Talatat from Hermopolis before the Second World War , a number of the blocks ended up in various private collections and museums. Important collections of these pieces are, for example, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York .

Most of the blocks from Karnak were rediscovered in the ninth pylon of the great Temple of Amun , where they had been built in the time of the haremhab . In contrast to the Talatat from Tell el-Amarna, which are made of limestone , these Talatat consist almost exclusively of sandstone . In total, the corpus here comprises over 40,000 objects and a number of cycles could be identified. Among them is a Sedfest (Heb-Sed) cycle, of which about 850 blocks exist.

More locations

Other sites are Medamud , Antinoupolis , Memphis and Heliopolis . Some Talatat from Memphis or Heliopolis were also found in the medieval city fortifications of Cairo . In addition, there are signs of talatat, possibly from the Nile - Delta originate.

literature

• Dieter Arnold : Lexicon of Egyptian architecture. Artemis & Winkler, Munich / Zurich 1994, ISBN 3-7608-1099-3 , sv “ Telatat ”.
• Rainer Hanke , Günther Roeder : Amarna reliefs from Hermopolis. New publications and studies. In: Hildesheimer Egyptological contributions. (HÄB) No. 2, Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 1978, ISBN 3-8067-8013-7 .

Web links

Commons : Talatat  - collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

1. ↑ R. Hanke, G. Roeder: Amarna reliefs from Hermopolis. Excavations of the German Hermopolis expedition in Hermopolis, 1929-1939 (= Hermopolis 1929-1939. Vol. 2 / Scientific publication / Pelizaeus-Museum zu Hildesheim. Vol. 6). Gerstenberg, Hildesheim 1969.
2. ↑ John Cooney Ducet: Amarna reliefs in American Collections. Brooklyn Museum, New York 1965.
3. ↑ Beatrix Löhr: Achanjati in Memphis. In: Studies on Ancient Egyptian Culture. (SAK) No. 2, Hamburg 1975, pp. 139-188.
4. ↑ B. Löhr: Ahanjati in Heliopolis. In: Göttinger Miscellen . No. 11, Göttingen 1974, pp. 33-38.
5. ^ Désirée Heiden: Pharaonic building materials in the medieval city fortifications of Cairo. In: Communications from the German Archaeological Institute, Cairo Department. (MDAIK) No. 58, Mainz 2002, pp. 257-275.
6. ↑ Labib Habachi: Khatâ`na-Qantîr: Importance. In: Annales du service des antiquités de l'Égypte. (ASAE) No. 52, 1954, pp. 443-562 (see especially panel XXII / XXIII).