As official donor of the archaeological project ‘Medjehu’ I realized this painting inspired by part of their research:
Extract from the newsletter n°2, October 2023, ‘Project Medjehu team’
“…the satisfaction and the awareness of how lucky we are to be able to “follow the roads of wood” thanks to your support that has enabled us to continue our research but also to publish it throughout this past year. Unlike other regions of the Mediterranean, the environmental conditions at many sites in Egypt offer ideal conditions for the exceptional preservation of many wooden objects.”
The aim of the Medjehu project is to trace important wooden objects networks through a multidisciplinary approach that includes systematic analysis of wood species (both Egyptian and imported), detailed technological examination, and stylistic and epigraphic study of each object. An important scientific examination used for dating processes of wooden and organic elements is the carbon-14 dating system.”
In this painting, Alberto Ballocca elaborated some scientific characteristics symbolically linked to the technical functioning of carbon dating, in relation to the meaning of the glyph m-4 , which is a notched palm branch used to indicate the passage of time. (Hieroglyphs classification by Alan H. Gardiner book).
Carbon-14, is affected by solar cosmic rays, rapidly oxidizes becoming carbon dioxide, entering the atmospheric carbon cycle, plants and animals absorb it with carbon dioxide, and when they die, they stop exchanging it with the biosphere and carbon decays within times determined by the radioactive decay law, thus, a historical chronology and timeline datation of the artifact, is obtained.
