It’s been more than a year since I made a temple reconstruction. I’ve been busy with my two kids. (By the way my ten year old son extracted the cost of a graphics card out of me after Christmas by beating me in an archery competition watch the video here)
The festival of Divine Union of the goddess Hathor and Horus is something I’ve written about in the past and would like to illustrate. The statue of Hathor would travel from Dendara to the temple of Horus at Edfu, a distance of 106 miles before the festival kicked off. On the way she would stop off at towns and villages and her sacred barque, containing her statue, would have rested within a local barque station over night.
Blessing would have been bestowed on the local community and there would have been a welcoming by the people and a celebration.
So I imagine a river boat transporting the sacred barque containing the statue, obviously with an entourage from the temple. Each day the flotilla would divert along some local canal to a town anchorage where a small chapel would stand. Over night the sacred barque would be taken from the boat to rest in this building.
The moment of arrival is going to be the subject of this reconstruction. I usually start with a rough sketch of the basic idea, and then build all the different elements from that sketch. You don’t usually see this bit – I normally just show the finished reconstruction. So here we go – this might take a few months.
Now I have made a barque station before so rather than re-invent the wheel, I’ll adapt one of my old models – that should speed things up a bit. But I’ll have to make the houses, dock side, the people, the boat, landscape, water, plants and trees and pretty much everything else. So I’ll get back to you in about a week so you can see how far I’ve got.
https://discoveringegypt.com/tag/festival-barque/
Hathor part five
Hathor part four
Hathor part three
Hathor part two