Talatat

The talatat (also called Telatat ) are the typical stone blocks from which the temples and buildings were built in the Amarna period of ancient Egypt. The name comes from the Arab talatat what "triple " means and was used in the exposure of the blocks of the workers.

Use

The talatat were specific building material for the Amarna period. They have a standard size of approximately 27 x 27 x 54 cm (ie, ½ x ½ x 1 Egyptian cubit ). The comparatively small size facilitated the rapid construction of temples, but also the subsequent demolition of these buildings. The talatat were later sought-after building material, especially for foundations and fillings of bivalve walls and temple pylons. So they escaped the later stone-robbers, and a variety of these blocks has been preserved.

Discovery

The most relevant findings of this talatat originally from the Aton temples at Karnak ( from the first years of the reign of Akhenaten ) and Akhetaten, the modern Tell el- Amarna. The majority of blocks from Tell el- Amarna was spent in the Nachamarnazeit after Hermopolis on the opposite bank of the Nile. There were 1500 of them in the German excavations, which were carried out 1929-1939 under the direction of the Hildesheim Museum Director Günther Roeder, rediscovered in the foundation of a built in the time of Ramses II temple for the god Thoth. Since it was not possible the excavation team before the Second World War, completely excavate the area where the talatat of Hermopolis, came a number of blocks in various private collections and museums. Important collections of these pieces are for example in the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the Brooklyn Museum in New York.

Most coming from Karnak blocks were rediscovered there in the ninth pylon of the great temple of Amun, where they had been built in the time of Horemheb. In contrast to the talatat from Tell el- Amarna, which are of limestone, are these talatat almost entirely of sandstone. Overall, the corpus comprises here over 40,000 objects and a number of cycles could be identified. Below is a W-festival ( Heb- Sed ) cycle, there are only about 850 of the blocks.

More Locations

Other localities are Medamud, Antinopolis, Memphis and Heliopolis.Einige talatat from Memphis or Heliopolis found themselves installed in the medieval fortifications of Cairo. In addition, there is evidence of talatat that may come from the Nile Delta.