Dig Diary, March 10, 2018:Although we left Luxor on February 11, our conservators, Salah Salim (left

Dig Diary, March 10, 2018:Although we left Luxor on February 11, our conservators, Salah Salim (left) and Mohamed Abdu continued their work on the Sekhmet statue they have been restoring. Here they are with the finished product on February 22. Jaap and Julia were able to visit the site again and sent us most of the photographs that follow.Just a reminder of what the statue looked like at the start of the 2018 season: a bunch of sadly broken and badly damaged pieces of stone, with remains of the failed 1920s restoration.By February 18, Mohamed and Salah (aided by Ayman Farouk) were in the final stages of the actual restoration. In this photograph, taken by our foreman Abdel Aziz Farouk, Salah is filling the mould he made to replace the statue’s missing left forearm while Mohamed is consolidating a broken part of the base.Even though the broken piece of the base was successfully re-attached by February 20, there was still a gap at the bottom, which needed to be filled. The white plaster and wood seen here hold the fill material in place. In the meantime, Mohamed went on with filling in cracks and tinting the fill to match the stone. There is a delicate balance between matching the fill color to the stone so that the contrast isn’t jarring to the eye and making sure that the fill cannot be mistaken for part of the original statue.The restoration was finished on February 22. Here is the left side of the statue, which was in the best shape, with the restored forearm. While it is not always a good idea to replace a missing component completely, here it made sense as a support to what is left of the upper arm and a firmer attachment for the left hand.If you remember, from the February 12 post the right side of the statue was still in a very fragile condition when we left, with deep cracks and a large portion of the right rear missing. Mohamed and Salah did a great job filling in the gaps and adding a new rear support. It’s not beautiful (the statue is too badly damaged for that to be possible), but it is now stable.Here is the team that worked so hard on the restoration. Our inspector Mai Yusuf Abul Hagag agreed to stay on after we left to supervise the work on behalf of the Supreme Council of Antiquites. Salah and Mohamed did the delicate work, with the assistance of Ayman Farouk and two other helpers. We thank them all for their efforts that have turned a bunch of damaged pieces of stone back into a recognizable statue of Sekhmet.Posted by Richard Fazzini and Mary McKercher -- source link

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