Brooklyn's Egypt Dig

An archaeological excavation in Luxor, Egypt, has uncovered an important relief object, the Brooklyn Museum announced yesterday.

The museum's ongoing expedition to the Temple Precinct of the Goddess Mut at South Karnak discovered a painted and gilded lintel that had originally topped the doorway of a religious structure.

"Some of the significance of the lintel is the quality of its carving and its gilding," the director of the museum's excavation of the site, archaeologist Richard Fazzini, said in a press release. "A small number of ancient Egyptian reliefs were gilded, but that adornment has seldom survived. Equally important is the unusual nature of its iconography, which has its origins in the early first millennium B.C. but which is here dated to the Ptolemaic Period or early Roman Period (late fourth to late first century B.C.) by the inscriptions."

The expedition team discovered the object at the end of January, and local officials of Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities sent photographs of it to the council's headquarters in Cairo. Last Thursday, the Egyptian minister of culture, Farouk Hosni, announced that the lintel was "significant." It was moved to the Luxor Museum of Ancient Egyptian Art, where it will be displayed.

The Brooklyn Museum has been working at the site for more than 20 years.