Standards-9990
Photographic/sketch documentation
The first American to get a PhD in Egyptology (1894, from the University of Berlin), James Henry Breasted was the founder of the Oriental Institute in Chicago.
We can guess Breasted would have been at least 24 in 1894. We know that his photographic techniques were instrumental in the development of the method used by the university in documenting historic artifacts.
( I doubt that any one took a desk inside of the tombs, sat there and sketched the images by candle light.) The important part here is the ability to finally nail down a person who is credited with making a sketch of the hieroglyph... A person who actually saw it or saw a photograph of it. It is this person who established the step of starting with high resolution photos which were taken to buildings, placed on a desk and reconstructed.
The next step is to compare any photograph of the hieroglyph with the sketch. Photographic documentation is essential to keep the honest, honest and for the mistakes to be corrected.
When I inquired about this particular inscription, I got this reply
The inscription is written on the facade of a rock cut shrine in Middle Egypt known today as the Speos Artemidos, which is near Beni Hasan.
The inscription is almost impossible to see and photograph as it is in shadow most of the time
It is essential to photograph and digitalize all remaining images/hieroglyphics for future generations.
I share a common problem with many others. I like all kind of Egyptology topics and I like to play Mexican Jumping Bean.. going from one to another... but I decided to take just one topic to keep jumping back to .. Hyksos. What ever your topic of choice is, you might trace down the source of any information to see if the source can be documented or if it is but web site parrots, pasting the gossip of other web site parrots.
============================
A great and worthy work
The Epigraphic Survey based at Chicago House in Luxor, Egypt, is directed by W. Raymond Johnson, PhD, Research Associate (Associate Professor).
The mission of the Survey since its founding in 1924 has been to produce photographs and precise line drawings of the inscriptions and relief scenes on major temples and tombs at Luxor for publication. .
THE 'CHICAGO HOUSE METHOD'
Founder James Henry Breasted committed the Epigraphic Survey to the preservation of Egypt's cultural heritage by non-destructive means: through documentation so precise it could stand alone as a replacement in the absence of the original monument. Large-format photography (8x10, 5x7, and 4x5 inch negatives) is an essential tool in this process, and one of the first goals of Chicago House was to create a photographic archive of as many of Egypt's accessible standing monuments as possible, photographed inside and out.
But Breasted understood that photographs alone cannot capture all the details of the often damaged wall scenes of individual monuments; the light source that illuminates also casts shadows which obscure details. To supplement and clarify the photographic record, precise line drawings are produced at Chicago House which combine the talents of the photographer, artist, and Egyptologist. First the wall surface is carefully photographed, with a large-format camera whose lens is positioned exactly parallel to the wall to eliminate distortion. From these negatives photographic enlargements up to 20x24 inches are produced, printed on a special matt-surface paper with an emulsion coating that can take pencil and ink lines.
An artist takes this enlarged photographic print mounted on a drawing board to the wall itself, and pencils directly onto the photograph all of the carved detail that is visible on the wall surface, adding those details that are not visible or clear on the photograph. Back at the house the penciled lines are carefully inked with a series of weighted line conventions to show the three dimensions of the relief, and damage that interrupts the carved line is rendered with thin, broken lines that imitate the nature of the break.
When the inking is complete, the entire photograph is immersed in an iodine bath that dissolves away the photographic image, leaving just the ink drawing. The drawing is then blueprinted, the blueprint is cut into sections and each section is mounted on a sheet of stiff white paper. These 'collation sheets' are taken back to the wall where the inked details on the blueprint are thoroughly examined by two Egyptologist epigraphers, one after the other. These epigraphers pencil corrections and refinements on the blueprint itself with explanations and instructions to the artist written in the margins. The collation sheets are then returned to the artist, who in turn takes them back to the wall and carefully checks the epigraphers' corrections, one by one. When everyone is in agreement, the corrections are added to the inked drawing back in the studio, the transferred corrections are checked for accuracy by the epigraphers, and the drawing receives a final review by the field director.
Consultations between artist, epigraphers, and field director, the consensus of all talents combined, ensures a finished 'facsimile' drawing that is faithful to what is preserved on the wall in every detail; this is the essence of what is generally referred to as the 'Chicago House Method.' The corrected ink drawings, photographs, text translations, commentary, and glossaries are then taken back to Chicago for processing and publication in large folio volumes for distribution worldwide.
CONSERVATION PROGRAMS
Under Lanny Bell's directorship twenty years ago the Epigraphic Survey added conservation to its program and a conservator to the staff. Now, because of rapidly changing conditions in Egypt that are causing the monuments to decay at an ever faster rate, we have expanded our conservation programs even further.
CHICAGO HOUSE
The Chicago House photographic archive is a major research collection containing over 18,000 negatives and 20,000 prints ranging in date from the late-nineteenth century to the present. A project to conserve, register, and provide proper archival storage for the collection was recently completed and a catalog of the archival holdings, 'The Registry of the Photographic Archives of the Epigraphic Survey,' was published in 1995. In 1999 the Chicago House Imaging Center was formed to coordinate the scanning of the entire archive onto CD-ROM for inclusion in our Photo
For further information on contributions to the work of the Survey, contact the Development Office at (773) 702-9513 or oi-membership@uchicago.edu
zendz
