Luxor, decoded.

The hall is carved two different ways

Great Hypostyle Hall — compare the north wall with the south

Compare raised relief, where figures stand above the background, with sunk relief, cut into the stone. Seti I’s decoration and Ramesses II’s work provide examples of both techniques; some of Ramesses II’s reliefs were recut from raised to sunk.

The different techniques and recut surfaces help distinguish phases of decoration. They do not, by themselves, establish a ruler’s motive for changing the work.

A name cut out of the wall

Throughout the temple; easiest to find on the middle-terrace colonnades, in the offering scenes

Clean, deliberate hollows where a figure or a name used to be — sometimes a neatly emptied oval where a cartouche (an oval frame containing a royal name) sat, sometimes a standing figure hacked back to its outline — with the scene around it left completely untouched.

Fact — the erasure, and its thoroughness. Uncertain — the motive. Specialists disagree, and the evidence for when the work was done argues against the familiar personal explanation.

This was careful work, not vandalism. Whoever did it knew exactly what to remove and left everything else alone. That is what makes the motive worth arguing about — and the popular version, a jealous successor striking at once, is the reading the dating fits worst.

Colour survives exactly where the roof did

The roofed areas and the shaded, deep-cut reliefs — look up under the surviving ceilings

Medinet Habu keeps more original pigment than almost anywhere else in Thebes — and it is not evenly spread. Look up under the surviving ceilings and into the deep-cut reliefs. Three thousand years of sun did the rest.

Surviving pigment helps you imagine a more colourful temple setting. It does not show that every surface elsewhere used the same colours or programme.