| ca.1895 French photochrom GREAT TEMPLE AT PHILAE, EGYPT, #469 |
Photochrom titled Le grand temple de Philoe, page size 31 x 24 cm, image size 22 x 15.5 cm. From: Autour du Monde - Aquarelles - Souvenirs de Voyages, Paris, L. Boulanger, editeur.
Philae,
Arabic JAZIRAT FILAH, island in the Nile River just above the First Cataract and the old Aswan Dam and 7 miles (11 km) south-southwest of Aswan city, in Aswan muhafazah (governorate), Egypt. Its ancient Egyptian name was P-aaleq; the Coptic-derived name Pilak ("End," or "Remote Place") probably refers to its marking the boundary with Nubia. The conventional name is Greek, but locally it is known as Qasr Anas al-Wujud, after a hero of The Thousand and One Nights. Before its gradual submergence in the reservoir created by the old Aswan Dam in 1902 and 1907, the alluvium-covered granite rock of Philae, 1,500 by 480 feet (460 by 150 m), had always been above the highest Nile floodings. Accordingly, it attracted many ancient temple and shrine builders, earning the still current name of Jazirat al-Birba ("Temple Island").
From early Egyptian times the island was sacred to the goddess Isis; the earliest structures known are those of Taharqa (reigned 689-664 BC), the Cushite 25th-dynasty pharaoh. The Saites (664-525 BC) built the earliest-known temple, found dismantled and reused in the Ptolemaic structures. Nectanebo II (Nekhtharehbe [reigned 360-343 BC]), last pharaoh of the 30th dynasty and last independent native ruler of Egypt prior to 1952, added the present colonnade. The complex of structures of the Temple of Isis was completed by Ptolemy II Philadelphus (reigned 285-246 BC) and his successor, Ptolemy III Euergetes (fl. 246-221 BC). Its decorations, dating from the period of the later Ptolemies and the Roman emperors Augustus and Tiberius (27 BC to AD 37), were, however, never completed. The Roman emperor Hadrian (reigned AD 117-138) added a kiosk west of the complex and a gate to the east. Other small temples or shrines dedicated to Egyptian deities include a temple to Imhotep and one to Hathor and chapels to Osiris, Horus, and Nephthys.
The Temple of Isis continued to flourish during Roman times and was not closed until the reign of Justinian I (AD 527-565). Late in Justinian's reign the temple was converted into a church, and two other Coptic churches were built in the still-prosperous town.
All these structures were thoroughly explored and reinforced (1895-96) before being partially flooded behind the old Aswan Dam. In 1907 a careful inspection revealed that salts were damaging paints on the decorations. When the temples reemerged after 1970 with the completion of the High Dam upstream, it was found that considerable damage had been done to the shrines. A decision was therefore made to remove them to higher ground on the nearby island of Agilkia. The island was leveled to resemble the original Philae, and the temples were rebuilt in 1980, returning them to some measure of their original beauty.
Photochrom
Photochrom (also called the Aäc process) prints are colorized images produced from black-and-white photographic negatives via the direct photographic transfer of a negative onto lithographic printing plates. The process is properly considered a photographic variant of chromolithography, a broader term referring to color lithography in general.
History
The process was invented in the 1880s by Hans Jakob Schmid (1856–1924), an employee of the Swiss company Orell Gessner Füssli, a printing firm with a history extending back into the 16th century. Füssli founded the stock company Photochrom Zürich (later Photoglob Zürich AG) as the business vehicle for the commercial exploitation of the process and both Füssli and Photoglob continue to exist today. From the mid 1890s on the process was licensed by other companies including the Detroit Photographic Company in the US and the Photochrom Company of London.
The photochrom process was most popular in the 1890s, when true color photography was first being developed but was still commercially impractical.
In 1898 the US Congress passed the Private Mailing Card Act which allowed private publishers to produce postcards. These could be mailed for one cent each — the letter rate at the time was two cents. Thousands of photochrom prints, usually of cities or landscapes, were created and sold as postcards and it is in this format that photochrom reproductions became most popular. The Detroit Photographic Company reportedly produced as many as seven million photochrom prints in some years, and ten to thirty thousand different views were offered.
After World War One, which brought an end to the craze for collecting Photochrom postcards, the chief use of the process was printing posters and art reproductions, and the last Photochrom printer operated up to 1970.
Process
A tablet of lithographic limestone, known as a "litho stone," is coated with a light-sensitive coating, comprising a thin layer of purified bitumen dissolved in benzene. A reversed half-tone negative is then pressed against the coating and exposed to daylight for a period of 10 to 30 minutes in summer, up to several hours in winter. The image on the negative allows varying amounts of light to fall on different areas of the coating, causing the bitumen to harden and become resistant to normal solvents in proportion to the amount of light that falls on it. The coating is then washed in turpentine solutions to remove the unhardened bitumen and retouched in the tonal scale of the chosen color to strengthen or soften the tones as required. Each tint is applied using a separate stone bearing the appropriate retouched image. The finished print is produced using at least six, but more commonly from 10 to 15, tint stones.