I was going to post in Don's thread lower down but it's degenerated into bickering and I lost patients following the posts and gave up.

So a new post just on the so-called "Dream Stella" that sits between the Sphinx's paws. It also gives me an opportunity to correct a few points in my previous post.





This is a scan from my copy of Vyse's "The Pyramids of Gizeh" Volume III 1837 which shows the partial cartouche of Khafre near the bottom at the point where the surface was already badly deteriorated.



This drawing is based on Salt's sketch of 20 years earlier from 1817 (not as I wrote before Caviglia's sketch, Salt collected Caviglia's notes for publication but produced the drawings himself but only part of the material was ever published as he intended).

As far as I'm aware Salt's sketch has only been reproduced once in print in "The Sphinx Revealed" British Museum Research Publication No 164 2007. Obviously his sketch is long out of copyright but as the book is a recent publication I don't think I can scan it.

Comparing it with Vyse's shows only a few differences but Salt's is better drawn than Vyse's copy.

It's worth pointing out that at the time of Caviglia's excavation and Salt's sketch the hieroglyphs could not be read so they had no idea they had recorded the cartouche of Khafre.

A more sophisticated drawing appeared later in 1842 in Lepsius's "Denkmaeler aus Aegyten und Aethiopien". By this time the inscription could be read and Lepsius filled in some hieroglyphs from the context of surrounding ones. Even by this time the stela had suffered further damage and the serpent on the Khafre cartouche had almost gone.



Sadly this area is nothing but rough granite now and the surface hieroglyphics have gone. There's no point posting a photo as there's nothing to see and the high resolution ones I've been using aren't my copyright anyway. The two isolated areas of hieroglyphics lower down had gone by Lepsius's time and have completely disappeared now.

Jon

www.egyptarchive.co.uk