Colorful frescoes with a vulture goddess and a snake goddess were found in the temple of Khnum in Egypt.

At the temple of Khnum at Isna, on the west bank of the Nile in Upper Egypt, German and Egyptian researchers discovered a series of brilliant ceiling frescoes. According to the German Egyptologist Christian Leitz of the University of Tübingen, the relief paintings in the central part of the ceiling amount to a total of 46 paintings, including the Upper Egyptian vulture goddess Nekhbet and the Lower Egyptian snake goddess Wajit. The portal writes that Nekhbet, depicted with the head of a vulture, wore the white crown of Upper Egypt, while Wajit could be identified by the crown of Lower Egypt with a cobra on top. physics.org.

From the Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies at the University of Tübingen and Dr. Researchers from the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities, led by Hisham al-Leyti, have been working since 2018 to clean the bas-reliefs, paintings and inscriptions from the temple. gradually revealing their original colors. “Ancient images of temples and deities were often painted in bright colors, but over time they faded or even completely disappeared as a result of external factors,” explains Leitz. “The temple of Khnum at Isna was lucky in this sense: the images inside were covered with a fair layer of dirt and soot for more than two thousand years, and this helped them survive.”

More than half of the ceilings and eight of the 18 columns were cleaned, preserved and documented by a group led by Ahmed Emam. From the temple at Isna, 60 km south of Luxor, just in front of the entrance was an extension called the pronaos – a sandstone structure 37 m long, 20 m wide and 15 m high – was installed later. More so than during the time of the Roman emperor Claudius (41-54 AD). The fact that it is in the center of the city may be the reason why Egypt was not used as a source of building stone during industrialization unlike other structures.