The Reliefs of the Chapel of Nebhepetra Mentuhotep at Gebelein

In 1910 Ernesto Schiaparelli, along with the Italian Archaeological Mission on behalf of the Regio Museo di Antichità Egizie, excavated the area where, during the Eleventh Dynasty, King Nebhepetre Mentuhotep erected a chapel to the goddess Hathor at the site of Gebelein. Some of the blocks belonging to this chapel had already been moved to the Cairo Museum during the nineteenth century, and finds during Schiaparelli’s campaign were taken to the Egyptian Museum at Turin. In this work, Elisa Fiore Marochetti presents documents from these two museums and gives an architectonic and decorative reconstitution of an unknown monument. The mostly unpublished blocks and fragments, presented here as the General Catalogue of the Turin Museum, follow a general introduction to the geographical, religious, and historical setting of Gebelein and of the chapel before Mentuhotep’s reunification of the land. The dating of the chapel is formulated on the basis of the iconographical style of the reliefs and of the titulary borne by Mentuhotep.

"The publication therefore not only presents a valuable reference to the Egyptian antiquities housed in Turin’s Egyptian
Museum. It also presents a valuable addition to literature on Egyptian temple decoration and development, royal iconography,kingship and the course of events on the verge of the Middle Kingdom."
Nico Staring, Macquarie University