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In 1910 Ernesto Schiaparelli, along with the Italian Archaeological Mission on behalf of the Regio Museo di Antichit 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 The mostly unpublished blocks and fragments, presented here as the General Catalogue of the Turin Museum, follow a general introduction to the geographical, religious, and historical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.
About the author
Elisa Fiore Marochetti, M.A., M. Lit., Ph.D. in Egyptology, is director at the Soprintendenza per i Beni Archeologici del Piemonte e del Museo Antichità Egizie. After postgraduate studies in Oxford and Rome, with the theses
The Development of the Design of the Mastaba Tomb and
The Chapel of Mentuhotep at Gebelein, she took up her appointment as curator at the Soprintendenza al Museo delle Antichità Egizie in Turin. Her fields of interest are mainly design and symbolism in art and architecture from the Old Kingdom to the Middle Kingdom, and the collection of the Egyptian Museum in Turin. Since 2000 she has lectured on Egyptology for the Faculty of Language and Foreign Literature at the University of Turin, and for the Faculty of Literature at the University of Rome "Tor Vergata."
