Designing a Temple for Repit
An Art History of Ptolemaic Athribis. Athribis-Studien II
by Margaret Swaney
The Repit temple is located at the ancient site of Athribis in the 9th Upper Egyptian Panopolite nome, to the west of modern Sohag near the village Sheik Hamed. Built by Ptolemy XII Neos Dionysos (ca. 80-58 and 55-51 BCE) the temple is one of the last great monuments of the Ptolemies, and it has only recently been fully excavated and published. The temple is dedicated to the relatively little-known leonine goddess Repit along with her consort, the preeminent regional god Min-Re and their divine child Kolanthes. The temple has a unique architecture and decorative program, leaving many questions about its function and the motivations of its local designers unanswered. Margaret Swaney offers the first art historical analysis of the Ptolemaic-era Repit temple, exploring how the collective decisions of priests, scribes, sculptors, plasterers, painters, and gilders came together to craft a complex mythological reality in stone. She combines a more traditional approach to the study of Ptolemaic temple art, which aims to identify the framework of semantic linkages between symmetrically paired and neighboring scenes known as the “temple grammar” with a technical study of the temple production, considering general trends in art production and visual meaning-making as well as the specific, context-dependent meanings of individual images and scenes and their means of production within each architectural space. Swaney provides in-depth analyses of royal and divine iconography, offering scene types and compositional structures as well as the technical strategies of the artists who materialized the local theology of the Repit temple.
The Repit temple is located at the ancient site of Athribis in the 9th Upper Egyptian Panopolite nome, to the west of modern Sohag near the village Sheik Hamed. Built by Ptolemy XII Neos Dionysos (ca. 80-58 and 55-51 BCE) the temple is one of the last great monuments of the Ptolemies, and it has only recently been fully excavated and published. The temple is dedicated to the relatively little-known leonine goddess Repit along with her consort, the preeminent regional god Min-Re and their divine child Kolanthes. The temple has a unique architecture and decorative program, leaving many questions about its function and the motivations of its local designers unanswered. Margaret Swaney offers the first art historical analysis of the Ptolemaic-era Repit temple, exploring how the collective decisions of priests, scribes, sculptors, plasterers, painters, and gilders came together to craft a complex mythological reality in stone. She combines a more traditional approach to the study of Ptolemaic temple art, which aims to identify the framework of semantic linkages between symmetrically paired and neighboring scenes known as the “temple grammar” with a technical study of the temple production, considering general trends in art production and visual meaning-making as well as the specific, context-dependent meanings of individual images and scenes and their means of production within each architectural space. Swaney provides in-depth analyses of royal and divine iconography, offering scene types and compositional structures as well as the technical strategies of the artists who materialized the local theology of the Repit temple.
- By (author) Margaret Swaney
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