Thursday, July 6, 2017

El-Amarna - The Private Houses .. The Official Residence of a Noble – Workmen's Houses – Foreigners' Houses .. Part ( 9 )

Such was the estate of a private individual – not a particularly wealthy one perhaps, but nevertheless quite a warm man . And every private house conforms to the principles just described . A prince might have a dozen columns in his entrance hall and a few more rooms, a poor man was content with a hovel consisting of a central room with mere cubby-holes opening off it, but the principle of a main living-room surrounded by others to keep it cool is invariable .




A slight variation is noticeable in some large mansions which seem to be in the nature of official residences . The best example is the house U. 25. 11. . Apart from the King's house it is the largest in the whole city and the walls were left standing to a good height .



The entrance to the estate lies almost opposite the ceremonial gateway in the great wall at the North end of the city . There are two courtyards with outbuildings in them . One of these has two square piers and a hearth ; it was probably the guard-room . A flight of ten steps leads up to the front door . The porch has one column and the vestibule two . These rooms are larger than the main living-room in most houses . The entrance hall had no less than twelve columns . The four column bases in the central room are no less than four feet in diameter . The North hall has four columns and probably also peculiar long partitions of whitewashed bricks which run out from the walls and practically touch the columns . These were observed in an exactly similar house which lies immediately to the South . Perhaps they were for some lustration ceremony . Opening off this room is a long store-room with shelves to hold such liquid refreshment as might be offered to a guest . To the South of the central room is another feature which this house has in common with that to the South, a large room with two columns and two smaller rooms opening off it . Here deep chests of brick were found against the walls . They may have been clothes-presses and this a robbing-room . Behind the central room is a small sitting-room with a single column, occupying the position usually assigned to the inner sitting-room of the harem quarter . Here, however, there is no communication with any room but the central one, and furthermore there are no traces of any rebate or nibs for the door . This implies that it could never have been shut off by anything more substantial than a curtain . It is, in fact, a prolongation of the public reception-rooms, and the owner probably admired the vista of columns which could be obtained from the entrance hall right through to the back of the house . As is always the case in these official houses, the domestic quarters are cramped in the extreme and make no provision for anyone but the master of the house . Here there is a corridor which leads to a small anteroom, behind which the bathroom and closet were apparently combined, the master's bedroom, and a dressing-room with shelves . The cramped appearance of these rooms in contrast to the splendour of the rest of the house does not mean that the owner was a bachelor or even a misogynist two species of mankind unknown in Egypt . It must mean that the owner was liable to spend a night or two here while engaged on official duties which prevented him from returning to his private house . Or he may only have taken a midday siesta here – that is not unknown in Government offices .






South of his house lay his garden with a lake and a chapel built of stone surrounded by orderly rows of trees between which the course of the irrigation ditches can still be made out . The size of his chapel and its construction in stone are paralleled in the house to the South, where there was the further elaboration of two sets of massive pylon towers converting the chapel into a small temple .



A narrow passage led round the North side of the house, passing a large paddock on one side where the well was, to the granary court which lies at the back of the house . Here were no less than sixteen large corn-bins . A small set of rooms backed immediately on to the house and access to these was obtained through a short corridor from the central room .



Beyond the granary court are a row of workmen's cottages . Curiously enough, some of these were the first houses ever excavated by the Germans long before the house itself was cleared and their connection with it known . They were rebuilt to house the trained workmen from Quft, so that all unconsciously the servants of the great house were lodged in the buildings originally intended for them . These cottages are of what we may call the County Council plan . They are identical in every respect with those of the Workmen's Village, and consist of an entrance hall with a closet at one end, a main living-room sometimes with a column, and two small rooms behind, bedroom and kitchen . Stairs gave access to the roof . Thus they are of the simplest possible pattern, and these narrow quarters the workman shared with his wife and family and often with the animals, for skeletons of both a cow and a horse have been found inside houses . A modified version of these cottages was used for the clerks' houses South of the Records Office .



South of these cottages was the domain of the steward . He had a small neat house of his own and could oversee not only the great barns and paddocks to the East but also the store-rooms and magazines ( storerooms ) to the West . In these store-rooms were small square bins which were evidently intended to hold specimens of different kinds of grain which would be removed with the shell scoopers that were found here .



This great official estate gives us the impression, with its barns and compounds, of having been perhaps the " Ministry of Agriculture " .



In this great city, the centre of the Empire, there must have been a large number of foreigners, resident and probably carrying on their trade . There is a picture found at Amarna which shows a Syrian soldier, Terura, who has married an Egyptian wife . They are sitting at home while an Egyptian servant is offering his master a drinking tube, one end of which is deep in a wine jar . Such scenes must have been common . Petrie found a house in which he thought he could detect Semitic ideas in the stopped place for ablution and the tiny adjoining room which may have acted as a place for prayer . Another house, this time in the North Suburb, not only shows signs of having belonged to a Mycenaean Greek, the inevitable Greek grocer of his day, but also is so good an example of a merchant's estate that it is worth describing . There is the usual gateway on to the street, and from here the path leads direct to the house . On the left is a chapel surrounded not by the orderly rows of trees which were the delight of the Egyptian's heart, but by a scattered grove, the trees planted in no sort of order, just as we see in frescoes and on rings from the Aegean . A pleasant touch is the thin screen wall which was built out at right angles to the porch to block the view of the kitchens and servants' quarters . The house is simple, there are only two reception-rooms, the entrance hall and the central room . The stairs leading hence up to the roof are peculiar, for instead of a blank wall supporting the second flight there is a square pier which is unique in Egypt but the rule in Crete and in Mycenaean Greece, though often a round column was preferred . The domestic quarters consist of a sitting-room, the master's bedroom, another bedroom presumably for the wife, and a bathroom . Here the bath-slab was made of plaster, and though we have definite evidence that this house could not have been inhabited for more than about seven years, yet that slab was repaired again and again so that now there are no less than eleven layers of plaster . This passion for plastering and replastering is not an Egyptian one, but we have only to look at the great hearth at Mycenae with its ten layers of painted plaster, and at the innumerable floor levels laid down in quite a short time on Cretan sites to find a parallel . Among the objects found here were a complete " pilgrim bottle " of Rhodian or Mainland Greek fabric, a number of Mycenaean sherds from other vessels and a face in pottery which was once the leg of a tripod – a purely Aegean shape – and resembles nothing so much as the bearded gold mask from the shaft graves of Mycenae . With only circumstantial evidence to go on we cannot take it as proved that the owner of the house was a Mycenaean, but the suggestion is worth making if only to make people realize that such foreigners must have been resident in the city .



From his entrance hall a small door led out to what was probably his shop . This was built up against the West wall of his house – he had no West hall – and consisted of a verandah, the roof of which was supported on two columns, an inner room and a number of magazines ( storerooms ) . The public entrance was no doubt in the North wall of the estate which is broken away . Round the South side of the house led a passage . On the left of this was a long brick-lined store-pit to which steps descended . This passage led to a large open square to the West with a separate entrance for the caravans to enter and unload . The goods might be temporarily stored and the animals tethered in a great khan or compound . This had a light awning over it supported on posts which rested on round bases of mud . At intervals there are mangers . It is precisely the type of khan that is so fast disappearing to-day in the East . One side of the square was taken up by the bakery already described . In a corner was a little house neatly planned and decorated but consisting only of a central room, a well-appointed bedroom and two or three small closets . This no doubt was the lodging of the steward or perhaps the chief pastry-cook .



Enough has been said to indicate the main features of the domestic architecture of the period . Its interest lies in the fact that the builders were unhindered by the presence of earlier structures to be fitted into their scheme or avoided . It is plain that we have at Amarna an expression of the architectural ideals of the Egyptians when given a free hand, and it is only disappointing that we have no other contemporary city with which to compare it .





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