- 著者
-
西本 真一
- 出版者
- 一般社団法人 日本オリエント学会
- 雑誌
- オリエント (ISSN:00305219)
- 巻号頁・発行日
- vol.44, no.1, pp.76-94, 2001-09-30 (Released:2010-03-12)
- 被引用文献数
-
1
1
A heavily ruined palace-city founded by Amenhotep III is preserved at Malqata on the West bank of Thebes, Egypt. It consists of various structures in the desert; several residential palaces, a temple of Amen, a festival hall, houses and apartments for attendants, and a desert altar “Kom al-Samak”, all of which were constructed by mud bricks with gaily decorative paintings on walls and ceilings. Since 1985 this area has become a concession of the Waseda University Mission, and re-excavation works have been carried out at the several rooms in the main palace. The innermost room of the main palace is the king's bedchamber, from where numerous fragments of the paintings on ceiling have been recovered. One of the most remarkable motifs is a succession of great vultures representing the Goddess Nekhbet outspreading the wings as reported by the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the former excavator, under each of which the names and titles of Amenhotep III are depicted. The succession of vultures is surrounded by geometrical patterns such as rosette and checker patterns.The first attempt to reconstruct the whole ceiling painting was carried out in 1988, and a detailed study through the record work of each fragment with assembling trials since 1989 has revealed the fact that the images of Nekhbet had been 8, not 7 as supposed in the earlier stage of reconstruction. All the 9 lines of inscriptions are also reconstructed with considering the each find spot on the floor. In the King's bedchamber, the floor of the innermost part is raised where the king's bed had been placed. It was come to light that the ceiling of this upper level is drawn more elaborate than that of the lower level; The inscriptions is slightly longer, and the color of the center circle of rosette pattern is also changed from red to green.The fragments of the northernmost ceiling suggest that the ceiling of this part would have been slightly curved down toward the north wall, and this reminds us a roof shape of pr-wr, a traditional shrine of the Upper Egypt, with a roof sloping down from the front. At the lower part of the walls the paneled pattern and a wavy line are depicted, but the rest of the interior decoration of this bed chamber is basically painted in glossy transparent yellow presumably imitating gold color, much similar to the shrines of Tutankhamun.In this paper the reconstruction process is described, with some technical reports on the construction method for obtaining the vast painting area of the ceiling without projecting the large wooden beams.