Naos of the decades

The naos of the decades is a Naos in black Granite preserved in several parts which were discovered with nearly two centuries of difference.

The upper part of the monument is exposed to the Musée of Louvre since the 19th century during which she was discovered and brought back by French explorers.

The remainder is made up many parts of which some were discovered in 2001 by Frank Goddio at the time of the underwater excavations that it organized with the research of the absorbed cities of Canope and Héracléion.

The unit was gathered for the occasion of an exposure into 2006 which recalls these excavations and discovered. It is thus practically the integrality of large a naos entirely covered of inscriptions, relative on the one hand, with the worship of the divinity whom it sheltered, and on the other hand, with that of tens of divinities who, divided into thirty-six groups or decades, form with the five last divinities who, according to the divine theory, protected the solar year that the Egyptians adopted millenia since and with the head of which the god of the naos was.

Going back to Nectanébo {{Ier}}, this high monument of 1m78, crowned by a Pyramidion, is dedicated to the god Chou, solar divinity par excellence who is represented on the wall of the bottom of the naos in a capped sitted lion of two high feathers decorated with the divine uraeus. The text which accompanies this figure indicates that the statue made thirty centimetres in height and that it was out of money covered with fine gold.

The fragments of the naos were found in the immersed part of the antique town of Canope in roads of Aboukir. A fragment of the naos of Tefnout, his/her sister and parèdre, was announced in a house of Alexandria to the 19th century but its current localization remains unknown. Both naos undoubtedly came from the town of Saft el-Henneh in the Eastern delta, from where they were moved in the area alexandrine, at the beginning of the ptolémaïque time.

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