Júlia Schmied Registering Loose Door Fragments in the Medinet Habu Blockyard

In the fall of 2007, when Egyptologist and Blockyard Assistant at the Epigraphic Survey, Júlia Schmied began working at Chicago House, there were several hundred unregistered loose fragments scattered about the Medinet Habu temple precinct. Some of them were inscribed and lying face down on the ground, already showing advanced signs of deterioration caused by groundwater and salt.

To prevent the further decay of these fragments, the Survey decided to survey the blocks and collect them into a newly built blockyard against the inside of the south enclosure wall of the precinct. Between 2008 and 2011 most of the fragmentary material from Medinet Habu, including the fragments kept in the small blockyard south of the main temple and in a storage room in the great mortuary temple of Ramses III, was transferred into this new blockyard.

This collection, numbering about 4000 pieces, is quite diverse, comprising fragments from all periods of the precinct’s history, from the early 18th Dynasty through the abandonment of the Coptic town Djeme in the ninth century A.D. Among the corpus is a special collection of about 50-100 doorjambs and lintels presumably from private houses that were built within the Medinet Habu precinct. The identification and analysis of this material, especially in the context of the occupation history of Medinet Habu, was begun in 2011 as part of Júlia's Ph.D. thesis.

We're pleased to have her essay, summarizing the hybrid epigraphic method developed for the documentation of these blocks, in our case study collection. Please, read the article, "Time Efficiency in Field Epigraphy - Documenting Loose Door Fragments in the Medinet Habu Blockyard" by clicking here!

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