An Ancient Temple’s True Colors

A museum uses technology to shed light on Egypt’s colorful past

BY ANNE GOSSEN

 Artists in ancient Egypt painted sculptures and temples in bright colors. Over time, the paint on most of these ancient treasures has worn away. That’s why many of the Egyptian sculptures and temples displayed in museums today are stone-colored. We can only imagine how they originally looked.

Now, a new project at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City makes it easier to picture what these ancient treasures really looked like. In a display titled Color the Temple: Scene 1, light is projected onto a wall of the 2,000-year-old Temple of Dendur (DEN-duhr) to show what it likely looked like when it was freshly painted.

A HISTORIC MOVE

Originally located near the Nile River, the Temple of Dendur is a small structure that was completed around 10 B.C. Years of flooding washed away its paint. In the 1960s, the Egyptian government decided to create an artificial lake that would have submerged, or covered, the temple entirely. To save the temple, Egypt gave it to the United States as a gift. It was taken apart and shipped to the U.S. in 1965. Two years later, the U.S. government gave it to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. The Met built a special wing for it, which opened in 1978. It has been a visitor favorite ever since.

SEEING AN ANCIENT TREASURE IN A NEW LIGHT

The light display is a joint project between the Met’s art historians and a group at the museum called MediaLab that uses technology to create new experiences for visitors. The team chose one scene from the temple’s walls and researched what it might have looked like in color. They studied color illustrations of Egyptian temples from the same period. Historical writings describing what the Temple of Dendur looked like over a century ago were also helpful.

Using this information, they created a lighting display that projects colored light onto the scene’s detailed carvings. The projection shows the Roman emperor Caesar Augustus dressed as a pharaoh(king) in a white kilt and two Egyptian gods in colorful dress. It also highlights different details in the scene, such as the hieroglyphs (written characters). Visitors can see the display through March 19. The Met hopes to use more of this kind of technology in the future.

“We’d love to do all of the [temple’s] scenes!” says Marco Castro Cosio, the MediaLab team leader.

Using science to understand the true colors of the Egyptian artwork adds a deeper understanding of it's beauty. How can you use what you have learned about color to make your work better?