Black and red granites in the Egyptian antiquity museum of Turin, a minero-petrographic and provenance study.

A recent project to investigate the stone artefacts preserved in the Egyptian Antiquity Museum of Turin has been undertaken, with the aim of supplying their systematic classification and suggesting the provenance site of the original raw materials. This paper focuses on seven sculptures dating back to the New Kingdom (18th-19th Dynasties): the statue of Ramses II, three of the 21 sculptures of the goddess Sekhmet, the statue of the goddess Hathor, the Ram-headed Sphinx and the sarcophagus lid of Nefertari. Petrographic observations have shown that all the sculptures are made of granitoid rocks, with variable composition from granite to granodiorite and tonalite. The observation of strong macroscopic analogies with the so-called black and red granites outcropping in the Aswan area has suggested a common origin of all the raw materials used for their manufacture. In order to verify this provenance hypothesis, several samples were collected in the Aswan quarry districts. According to results of a minero-petrographic and geochemical comparison between the statues and the Aswan quarry samples, it was possible to identify the source area of the stone sculptures and finally to highlight the importance of an archaeometric approach to the solution of archaeological problems.