The Graffiti on the Khonsu Temple Roof at Karnak: A Manifestation of Personal Piety.

• Author: Peden, A.J.
• Position: Book review

The Graffiti on the Khonsu Temple Roof at Karnak: A Manifestation of Personal Piety. By HELEN JACQUET-GORDON. The Temple of Khonsu, vol. 3. Oriental Institute Publications, vol. 123. Chicago: THE ORIENTAL INSTITUTE, 2003. Pp. xxiv + 119, plates. $180.

This book is clearly a labor of love, and one almost half a century in the making. For it was during the winter season of 1955-56, when she first visited Luxor, that Helen Jacquet-Gordon began a serious study of the graffiti inscriptions published in this folio, following on from an earlier interest in the history of the Twenty-second and Twenty-third Dynasties, the era to which most of these texts and drawings can be assigned.

At first sight, in its present format, this volume might seem to be on a grand scale for a publication of humble graffiti. But this adopted setting enables the work to be kept in standard form with the other magisterial volumes of the Khonsu temple publication series. (1) Moreover, this large-scale format (c. 41 cm. x 31 cm.) has a particular advantage in that it permits the publication of relatively large-scale photographic and facsimile presentations of the graffiti concerned, a useful feature with inscriptions often notoriously difficult to decipher and read. And it should be noted here that the quality of these photographic plates and line-drawings is, on the whole, excellent.

Due to their awkward location and the processes of wind and sand erosion on their slab bases, Jacquet-Gordon set herself a formidable task in compiling this catalogue. Happily it is one she has accomplished with great thoroughness. Her format of providing a position, a description, dimensions, date, plus transliteration and translation of the incised texts, is clear and helpful in every way. In each case a smaller reproduction of the graffito is also given.

One feature of her standard format is, however, puzzling. In the case of hieratic inscriptions, merely to repeat the hieratic text seems wasteful. A hieroglyphic transcription of the original hieratic would have been more useful for most potential users of the book. This minor grumble does not apply in any way to the smaller clutch of hieroglyphic graffiti; their reading presents, generally, no barrier.

Known to Western scholarship since the time of Champollion, the corpus of some three hundred and thirty-four surviving inscriptions covered in this book comes mostly from the remaining roof-blocks over the colonnade of the open-columned...