'To build a temple in the beautiful white stone of Anu'. The use of Tura limestone in Theban architecture

Karlshausen, Christina;De Putter, Thierry
(2017) Proceedings of the XI International Congress of Egyptologists, Florence, Italy 23-30 August 2015 — ISBN: [9781784916008], 308-312, published

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Tura limestone, exploited 15km south to the present-day Cairo, has been extensively used in the architecture of the Old Kingdom, notably for the casing of pyramids and visible parts of temples. By contrast, other parts of contemporary monuments were built in local limestone, exploited in quarries close to the construction sites. Tura limestone is regarded as a ‘prestige’ material, most probably because its fine-grained texture allowed the execution of finely detailed reliefs, and gave the building a plain white, shining appearance. A similar stone procurement/use pattern prevailed at Thebes in the 11th Dynasty, with building stone (sandstone) and fine-grained limestone coming from a nearby upstream quarry (Dababiya), used in visible parts of the monuments. Northern Tura limestone makes its first appearance in Thebes in the reign of Amenemhat I. The chronology of the monuments of this king in the Theban area is unfortunately poorly constrained but the use of Tura limestone blocks is evidenced in all sites where the king built (or rebuilt) temples: Tod, Armant, Dendera and Coptos, together with Dababiya limestone. Later on, Senwosret I predominantly used Tura limestone at Karnak. The specificity of Amenemhat I is that the king used both stones, from Dababiya and Tura. The reason why he did so is questioned in this paper. Constraints arising from procurement or contrasted geotechnical behaviour are ruled out, as the Dababiya quarry was to provide massive quantities of stone until the mid-18th Dynasty and; and Tura and Dababiya limestones are both used for Amenemhat’s monuments, in a wholly similar way, with strongly oversized blocks. It rather seems that the introduction of Tura limestone in the Theban architecture results from a mix of political and religious reasons. Politically, the use of Tura limestone helped anchoring the new dynasty, just founded by Amenemhat I, in the continuity of the great rulers and builders of the Old Kingdom and helped create, through the achievement of an ambitious architectural program, a strong architectural link between the north and south, representing the union of the two lands. In the religious sphere, too, there was an obvious ‘mirror effect’ between northern and southern Heliopolis. This parallelism was, in a typically Egyptian way, materialized by the use of a same ‘prestige’ stone at both locations. As this was unlikely to be noticed at first glance, the kings took care to state that they used Tura limestone in explicit texts carved on Theban monuments. If in the Middle Kingdom, there is an agreement between texts and the material used, then this is no longer true in the New Kingdom. However, it remains important to state that the temple is built in the ‘beautiful white stone of Anu’, even though the stone comes from a nearby quarry.
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Karlshausen, C., & De Putter, T. (2017). ‘To build a temple in the beautiful white stone of Anu’. The use of Tura limestone in Theban architecture. In G. Rosati, M.C. Guidotti (eds.) (ed.), Proceedings of the XI International Congress of Egyptologists, Florence, Italy 23-30 August 2015 (pp. 308-312). Archaeopress. https://hdl.handle.net/2078.5/226843