Ashmolean to project lost colours onto King Taharqa’s shrine

By Grace Kim

On 13 November, the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford will project the lost colours of the Shrine of King Taharqa, a monument built in northern Sudan in 690BC-654BC. The free projection in the museum’s Ancient Egypt and Sudan galleries will show the shrine’s original glowing colour nearly 3,000 years after its construction.

The monument is Britain’s only freestanding building from the pharaonic period. Liam McNamara, the Ashmolean’s keeper of antiquities, said: “The new projection—and the scientific research behind it—will allow visitors to appreciate and understand the shrine’s original painted decoration like never before.”

The science of recovering colour

The colour will arrive through a digital projection, developed after extensive research into surviving scraps and traces of pigment. Fragments of red paint remain in the crevices of the sandstone carvings.

Microscopic analysis and hyperspectral imaging (photography combined with spectroscopy, which measures how materials interact with light) revealed evidence of yellow and “Egyptian blue,” a brilliant pigment used to depict divine figures. Those colours had become invisible to the naked eye. The findings provide the basis for the projection’s reconstruction of the painted surface.

A king, a ruined temple and a new shrine

According to Liam McNamara, the Ashmolean’s keeper of antiquities, the carvings and inscriptions describe the shrine’s construction. They recount the young Taharqa, later king of Kush in Nubia and Pharaoh of Egypt, journeying north towards Thebes. He saw the ruins of an earlier brick temple to Amun-Re, built by Tutankhamen, with “the sand drifted to its roof.”

McNamara’s account says Taharqa vowed at his coronation to restore that temple. He then built the shining new shrine within a new temple. Scorch marks on the stones, also identified by the project, bear witness to its eventual destruction.

Two royal identities

The sandstone blocks carry carved relief (figures projecting from the stone) and were originally coated with plaster and brightly painted. The imagery shows Taharqa with the gods of Memphis, Heliopolis and Amun-Re. Amun-Re appears as both a Theban deity and the local Gematen deity.

• As an Egyptian pharaoh, Taharqa wears the Double Crown of Upper and Lower Egypt.
• As a Kushite king, he appears with a ram’s head, sun disc earrings and a Kushite crown surmounted by two cobras.

From Khartoum to Oxford

The Shrine of King Taharqa came to Oxford from Khartoum in 150 crates 90 years ago. The Sudanese government gave it to the Oxford University Excavations in Nubia, which had excavated the shrine and other monuments over several seasons.

Nora Griffith presented it to the museum in 1936 in memory of her husband, Francis Llewellyn Griffith. He had led and largely paid for the expeditions. He had taught himself Ancient Egyptian at Oxford because there was no department, and became the first professor of Egyptology and a renowned scholar.

What does the projection change for visitors?

The surviving red fragments and imaging evidence reveal a painted scheme the naked eye can no longer fully see. McNamara’s comment makes the purpose plain: visitors should understand the original decoration, not merely notice that colour survives.

For visitors, the change is interpretive, not merely decorative. The projection makes Taharqa’s two royal identities, his divine companions and the account of the ruined Amun-Re temple visible together. It translates microscopic pigment traces into a view across the shrine, while the stone still carries scorch marks and carved evidence of destruction.

The project has been supported by James Lupton, the Ashmolean’s chair of the board of visitors, and his wife Béatrice. From 13 November, the projection will put the recovered palette before every visitor to those galleries. Its practical value lies in whether that colour makes Taharqa’s royal and religious imagery easier to read.