Minoan Paintings from Tell el Dab´a

In the course of excavations of the Austrian Archaeological Institute together with the Institute of Egyptology, Univ. Vienna, at Tell el-Dab (eastern Nile Delta) 1990-1994 and from 1997 onwards, a total of about 400 big boxes of wallplaster fragments with Minoan wall painting fragments were retrieved. They came from a palace of the early 18th Dynasty. Perhaps only less than 10 % have been found. The rest was most probably destroyed by agricultural activity and levelling and by brick production. Half of the paintings have been found in secondary dumps. Others were found along the walls of the palace. The task is now to treat the fragments, which were under perannual irrigation for the last hundred years and to try to sort and reconstruct scenes according to the present knowledge of Minoan/Aegean iconography. A beginning has been made already within the project 11225 SPR "Minoische Fresken", which led to the publication "Bietak, M. and Mariantos, N., with contributions by C.Palyvou, R. Seeber and E. Grammatikaki, The Wall Paintings of Avaris I. This publication deals primarily with a bull leaping frieze. It is hoped to finish this book till the end of this year. The reconstruction of a second bull leaping frieze, hunting scenes and the representation of griffins have already been started. During 1997 a new technology in this reconstruction work was introduced by Dr. Clairy Palyvou. Within this process the ordinary facsimile drawings are not used anymore. Fragments of wall paintings are digitized into a computer and treated there for reconstruction to about 60 %. This new method is entirely objective and can be tested. The method is, however, very laborious, need endless working hours and also good restoration. The preservation conditions in the wet Nile mud of the Delta is of course much worse than at Aegean sites. After the experiences with the first bull leaping frieze, which was presented at the First International Congress of the Wall Paintings of Thera from 29.8. - 4.9.1997 with a poster exhibition, the same method will be applied now for the second bull leaping frieze and scenes with floor acrobats, of hunting and wildlife, as well as an emblematic presentation of griffins. The wall art from Tell el-Dab is especially interesting as it represents a period from which only few paintings are preserved from Crete (LMIA). Some iconographical details van be found in the wall paintings of Thera. Despite few paintings from Tell el-Dab have been published, there is a hot international debate about their cultural identification. While specialists like Nanno Marinatos, Lyvia Morgan, Peter Warren, Ellen Davies and Stefan Hiller identify them as Minoan paintings, others would like to see them more as a Levantine branch of the former. The international interest should be met by promoting documentation and publication.