Work Flow Studio

19/09/2026

19/09/2026

For most visitors today, ancient Egyptian temples seem to belong to a world of sandstone, silence, and shadow.

But that is not how they were meant to be seen.

The Temple of Dendur, built in Roman-ruled Nubia during the reign of Augustus and completed by the late 1st century BC, was once alive with color.

Its walls did not show Augustus as a Roman emperor in a toga.

They showed him as an Egyptian pharaoh, performing rituals before ancient gods in the visual language of Egypt itself.

In one scene on the temple’s south exterior wall, Augustus offers w**e to Hathor and Harendotes — a form of Horus.

Today, the stone looks bare.

More than two thousand years of erosion, along with flooding in the modern era before the temple’s rescue, stripped away the visible paint from this exterior relief.

So The Metropolitan Museum of Art attempted something remarkable.

Instead of repainting the sandstone, the museum used projection mapping — casting light directly onto the carved relief to create a digital reconstruction of how the scene may once have looked.

But this was not a recovery of the exact original colors.

No surviving pigment was detected on that particular scene, even with specialized imaging. The projected palette was a carefully researched reconstruction based on early records from Dendur, comparisons with other Egyptian temples, and known Egyptian color conventions.

For a moment, the wall changed completely.

Blue skin tones, red and green details, patterned garments, and multicolored hieroglyphs emerged from the pale stone, reminding modern viewers that ancient monuments were not born beige.

The Temple of Dendur does not simply preserve a building.

It preserves a lost way of seeing — a world in which sacred architecture once glowed with color.

Ancient Egypt was never meant to survive only in the color of stone.

15/09/2026

“Sarah Verwei is de auteur en formele overdrager van het The Future of Life Government Scholarship.





Vanuit dit scholarship verbindt zij futurisme, systeemdenken, intuïtieve kennis, menselijke ontwikkeling, technologie, ecologie en onderwijs tot een transversale visie op de toekomst van het leven.”

It's National Open Science Week this week, and Leiden University has a wonderful program. This year we focus on how can help make science more inclusive and equitable. Hope to see many of you there!

15/09/2026

12/09/2026

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