Nothing predestined Hourig Sourouzian to become an Egyptologist and to be the one who would one day discover a splendid statue of Queen Tiye, wife of Amenhotep (Amenophis) III and mother of Akhenaton, labelled the heretic Pharaoh. "As a child I never wished to become an Egyptologist, but when I was at prep school I dreamed once of a big pyramid and of a scribe." It was her interest in art and particularly her love for Pharaonic art that led Sourouzian to immerse herself into Egyptology and from there into archaeology. After studying art history and Egyptology in the Ecole du Louvre in Paris, she obtained her PhD from the University of Sorbonne with a thesis on Egyptian royal statuary. Like all the Armenians of her generation born in the Middle East, she has no linguistics problems and speaks fluently Arabic, Armenian, French and English. The lady is also at ease with classical Arabic, a discipline she mastered at the Ecole des Langues Orientales in Paris. "I rather speak about what I do, than who I am," she confesses blushing and without a trace of false modesty. As an art historian, her contribution, as she puts it, consists of re-assembling statuaries. Generally speaking, work on archaeological sites usually overlooks the statuary element, but because she specialised in royal statuary, Sourouzian has devoted herself to collecting, assembling and piecing together full size Pharaohs and queens from the fragments of statues and dispersed members of monuments found at archaeological sites. She has re-assembled statues with fragments coming from Karnak, others from different storerooms in the Cairo Museum, and even with copies of busts or heads that are part of the Egyptian collections in the Louvre or the Tokyo museums. "You may consider this an odd game of jigsaw-puzzle, but in fact it's a three-dimensional jigsaw-puzzle for which you need to research and study a monument, to have an absolute knowledge of the material used, i.e., pink or dark granite, limestone or quartzite". But if the grain of the material and its age are crucial and fundamental elements of this painstaking puzzle, "you need also to have a sense of touch" and especially have "the eye" says Sourouzian laughing. Today, the re-assembled group statue, or dyad, representing the ancient Egyptian deities Amun and Mut, seated side by side, that stands in the CairoEgyptian Museum, is just one of the numerous end products of the tedious and exhaustive re-assembling exercises of Sourouzian. Here again, the re-assembled dyad is composed of more than 100 pieces and fragments of different sizes collected from six different storerooms, and six of these fragments were only recently excavated. While proud of the assembled and mounted dyad of Amun and Mut, Sourouzian is no less pleased by a unique discovery she made a few years ago. As excavation behind the formidable colossi of Memnon was in full swing, Sourouzian was insisting that somewhere, not far away, there should be a statue of Tiye, Amenhotep's queen. "There she was, in all her majestic splendour," recalls the Egyptologist, her eyes moist with tears as she remembers the unforgettable moment. Lying on her side, covered in mud, not far away from the second pylon of the mortuary temple, just under the collapsed gigantic colossus of the Pharaoh, Queen Tiye had waited almost 3,500 years to be salvaged. This was back in the 2002-03 excavation season. Since then Sourouzian and her multinational team have discovered other statues, or fragments of sculptures, scattered or buried deep in saline-saturated mud on the site of the mortuary temple of Amenhotep III at Kom-Al-Hettan, on the west bank of the Nile at Luxor. The site is not only majestic but the Colossi of Memnon and Amenhotep III Temple Conservation Project is of prime importance because of its size and historical value, and as such requires the same amount and quality of work as that carried out on the Abu Simbel Temple. Lifting the statues, re-assembling them and re-erecting them, working on the Pylons, on the walls of the temple are some of the many aspects of this mammoth project, which includes draining the water-clogged terrain and clearing it of weeds and vegetation. Experts from Spain, Lebanon, Poland and the Czech Republic rub shoulders with an Armenian team of seismologists and geologists led by Arkadi Karakhanyan, director of the Institute of Geology in Yerevan. Last March, the official visit by a delegation headed by Egypt's Prime Minister Ahmed Nazif, Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni, Governor of Luxor Samir Farag and SCA Secretary-General Zahi Hawass confirmed the exceptional importance of the project and the remarkable work achieved to date. Combining her expertise -- Egyptology, history of art and archaeology -- Sourouzian is also the co- author of the Catalogue of the CairoEgyptian Museum with Mohamed Saleh, its former director. Feeling "privileged to be able to work in Egypt and especially on such a majestic site" she admits that re-assembling statuary is giving her extreme joy and satisfaction, but, as she puts it, "it also means there would be one fragment, less, left forgotten on a shelf in a store-room in a museum." Like the contribution of Nairy Hampikian, who "besides being a colleague and a good friend" leads the architectural research on the temple of Amenhotep III at Kom Al-Hettan, Hourig Sourouzian's contribution to Egyptian art history and to Egyptian archaeology may be considered small but it is definitely a "unique and original contribution".
