Highlights on the Deterioration of Rock Art at Unfinished Obelisk Quarry in Aswan-Egypt

Document Type : Original Article

Authors

1 Ministry of Antiquities, Luxor, Egypt

2 Department of Conservation, Faculty of Archaeology, Cairo University, Egypt

3 Department of Raw Building Materials & their processing, HBRC, Cairo, Egypt

Abstract

The unfinished obelisk quarry in Aswan is one of the most important archaeological sites in Egypt. This site contains very important rock art panels (paintings and inscriptions) which give the site further importance and are concerned with the activities of the quarry. Rock art panels at this site are subject to different kinds of physical, chemical and biological deterioration as a consequence of their exposure to the direct action of aggressive atmospheric agents (extreme temperature, wind, chemical weathering ,salts pressure and the rising water table from the canal at the site) and anthropogenic deterioration factors so; they suffer from different deterioration phenomena such as exfoliation, granular disintegration, detachment, salt crystallization, aesthetic disfigurement and chemical alterations. For this purpose, the chemical, physical and structural characterization were performed by means of Polarizing Microscope (PM), Scanning Electron Microscope (SEM) attached with EDX, X-Ray Diffraction (XRD), Infrared analysis (I.R) and microbiological study. The results have shown that these panels suffer from many crystallized salts such as sodium chloride and calcium sulphate (anhydrite or gypsum) and alteration of feldspars to clay minerals.

Keywords

Files

Share

How to cite

Statistics