The royal estate are
consists of The House of Penehsy, The Great Palace, The King's House, The Royal
Magazines and The Priests' Quarters .
The Great Temple itself had numerous annexes, most of them unfortunately
below the modern cemetery . The official house of Penehsy, Chief Servitor of
the god, lies outside the South-East corner of the temenos . Here no doubt was transacted the actual
business of the Temple revenues . The Hall of Foreign Tribute lies astride the
North wall of the temenos . It is a large building,
open in the middle where the throne would be set beneath the baldaquin ( or
baldachin, is a canopy of state over an altar or throne . It began as a cloth
canopy but can be a permanent architectural feature more correctly called a
ciborium ) . On all four sides a flight of steps descends towards this point .
The other important public buildings in this area consist mainly of long
rows of magazines ( storerooms ) for the storage of revenue and tribute, and of
offices such as the Records Office ( also known as the Bureau of
Correspondence of Pharaoh ), whose plans are irregular in the extreme and, like
the Tax-gatherer's Office in the North Suburb, are well provided with
waiting-rooms where the inevitable crowd which flocks to all public buildings
in the East could sit all day discussing their cases and arranging the amount
of the bribe necessary for their successful conclusion . The actual building (
although the name may refer to a larger complex of buildings ) is located behind
the buildings known as the " King's House " and the Small Aten
Temple, and is now ruined, and it appears to be where local villagers
discovered a deposit of tablets, now known as the Amarna letters around the
year 1888. The building included bricks stamped with the words Bureau of
Correspondence of Pharaoh .
We now turn to the residence of the King . First comes the Royal Estate
. Hat-Aten - the Castle of Aten – it was called . It occupies an area nearly
500 yards each way . West of the Royal Road lies the Great Palace . This was
excavated by Flinders Petrie in 1891 . It is a palace in the sense of a series
of great official halls and state reception rooms, but there is no place for
domestic quarters . These must be looked for elsewhere . The plan as it appears
at present is most confusing and it is hoped that further excavation will throw
more light on it . Furthermore, the pictures in the tombs do not give us as
much help here as in the case of the Temple . I imagine that the latter was not
only much easier to represent but was also so novel in plan that particular
efforts were made to show it accurately . The Great Palace, however, probably
showed little divergence from the normal and was in addition so complicated and
contained so many rooms that the artist merely selected such rooms as he felt
he would like to show and fitted them wherever they would go best in the
picture . The representations of the Palace are usually subordinated to the main
scene, which is the Window of Appearance . This probably was the room above the
bridge which led across the Royal Road to the gardens of the King's house on
the other side . There is, therefore, the possibility that the artist has
sometimes shown rooms from the King's house as well . But in any case it is
only further excavation that will shed any light on the matter . The wall
surrounding the Great Palace was double, leaving a passage all round
immediately within . This was a device regularly used where valuables were
kept, for it enabled quite a small guard to patrol the whole circuit and to see
at once whether anyone was trying to break in from outside .
The modern cultivation has encroached so much over the ruins that to-day
we do not even know where the entrance lay . At first glance the most striking
feature of the plan is the forest of square bases of mud brick at the South end
of the Great Palace . They were whitewashed and had a torus roll running up the
corners . Fragments of painted plaster showing trellis-work and vines were
found among them . It is possible, therefore, that these square piers ran up a
considerable height and supported a roof which had been painted in this way .
If this is so we have here the forerunner of those huge columned halls which
are such a feature of the next dynasty's architecture . It is possible,
however, that the painted plaster has fallen from the top of the piers
themselves, and the suggestion has been made that the whole of this area was a
vineyard, the vines running up the piers and across trellis-work laid above .
It would be in keeping with Egyptian ideas to decorate such supports for the
vines with a pattern of grapes . A third possibility too must not be overlooked
. Bearing in mind the rows of offering tables in the Temple, one's first
impression on looking at the plan is that these also are offering tables of the
same kind and that there is still to be found some chapel or altar in the midst
of them . Excavation will show, but the present height of these bases seems
rather too great and we have to remember that they must have weathered away to
a certain extent . Late in Akhenaten's reign this hall, or vineyard, or shrine,
fell into disuse and was used as a sort of lumber-room where broken wine jars
could be thrown, and eventually the entrance was blocked up by a brick wall .
To the North the Great Palace has been much denuded, though traces of
the foundations of stone walls are still to be found, and in one case of a
large altar whose sloping balustrade was found close by . North of the abutment
of the bridge was a group of rooms with painted pavements, but the only part of
the Great Palace to show a regular plan is the building still further North .
Here was an open court flanked by colonnades which appeared over a low
surrounding wall . Behind the colonnades were small cubicles fitted up with
shelves, while to the South lay a series of rooms with magnificently painted
pavements . The finest of these was protected by being roofed over after it was
found, but it was ruthlessly destroyed during some village feud and only sad
fragments remained to be transported to Cairo . The scene was divided into two
by a central path, painted with representations of Asiatic and Negro captives
to be trodden underfoot . On either side was shown a pond with fishes and
water-lilies in it and birds fluttering over . Surrounding the pond are marshes
in which papyrus waves and the wild-fowl flutter . Among the reeds calves are
plunging in a most delightfully natural manner, while a formal touch is added
to the whole by means of a border of bouquets and vases . It is one of the most
joyous and unconventional pieces of decorative work which has come down to us
from antiquity . A dado round the wall showed a group of servants making ready
for the return of their master, sweeping and sprinkling the ground and hurrying
along his dinner .
In the open court was a well, the balustrade carved with the name and
titles of the Queen . It may be that this was the Queen's pavilion . The
columns, of which fragments survive, also show a freedom and lack of
conventionality . Vines and convolvulus climb and cluster round the shafts,
reminding us of Gothic capitals . Birds hang head downward in " swags
" or the King and Queen are shown making offerings to the god . Many of
the capitals must have been a brilliant sight . They were of the old palm-frond
form, but the ribs and leaves instead of being merely indicated in the carving
were emphasized by inlaying brightly coloured glazes and gilding the
surrounding stone so as to give the appearance of the rich cloisonné work which was the pride of the Egyptian
jeweller . Cornices were also treated in this way . But it is typical of the
East that in the parts which would not show red and blue paint was substituted
for the glaze inlays and yellow for the gold . Colossal statues of quartzite
and granite stood in some court which has now disappeared and the whole
building must have had an appearance of unbelievable splendour .
At the extreme North
end of the Great Palace there seems to have been a craftsmen's quarter, for
many fragments of relief, finished and unfinished, were found here as well as
fragments of ushabti figures and a great
deal of granite dust . Here too was discovered the plaster death-mask which
probably gives us the King's actual features .
The bridge which connects the Great Palace with the King's House has
three openings, that in the centre being paved with mud brick, those at the
sides with stone . A feature of the construction is the huge size of the balks
of cedar used for tying the brickwork . The room above the bridge was
elaborately decorated with fantastic paintings of flowers and trees . No doubt
there was also some form of decoration outside, a cornice of uraeus heads, such
as we found at the great gateway in the North, or perhaps statues and
inscriptions, but nothing was left .
The King's House was built on a rise in the ground level, and stands out
even more by reason of a great substructure of brick which brings the West side
up to the proper level .
To the North of the
King's House lay the garden in three terraces, the lowest of which was occupied
by summer-houses and potting-sheds, the upper giving access to the bridge and
containing avenues of trees . Outside the entrance which lies to the North are
formal flower-beds . The whole garden is covered with a layer of plaster
rendering which is very good for some flowers, particularly carnations, though
we can hardly hope that Akhenaten grew those ! .
The house itself is entered direct from the garden, or if you came in
your chariot you drove up beside the bridge and passed through a small
courtyard whence a door brought you into an L-shaped court with the servants'
quarters and porters' lodge on your right . From here a series of lobbies leads
to the great central living-room, the roof of which was supported by no less
than six rows of seven columns each . To the South lies another hall with ten
columns in two rows . The family shrine is in a room to the East where an altar
of mud brick stands against the North wall with a few steps leading up to it
between sloping balustrades . The rest of the East side of the house is taken
up by the private suite of the King and Queen with their bedroom and bathroom and
small closets for wardrobes .
The decoration of the walls is very striking . At the bottom runs a
dado, of a simple panel pattern in the private suite, but elaborated in the
reception rooms by the introduction of the sedge alternating with the papyrus
as symbolizing the union of Upper and Lower Egypt . Above this were painted
scenes . Unfortunately only the lower part of these remains, the upper part
having been destroyed when the bricks were removed for building purposes in
El-Till . The more public rooms seem to have had processions of the subject
races of the Empire, Negroes and Libyans and Asiatics, while the ceiling was
painted yellow with pictures of ducks and other water-fowl fluttering over it .
In this it resembles very much the decoration of the palace of Amenhotep III at
Thebes . But a new and more characteristic scheme was adopted in the purely
domestic rooms, where by good fortune survived a good deal of the charming scene,
in which the Royal Family is seen at play . This painting was most cleverly
removed from the wall by Flinders Petrie and is now in Ashmolean Museum of Art
and Archaeology at Oxford, England . Further fragments which were recovered
during more recent excavations aid us in reconstructing the scene . Akhenaten
and Nefertiti are seated facing one another, he in his chair, she on a cushion
on the floor . The columns which support the roof of the room, the Venetian
blinds which keep it cool, the row of jars containing the beer and wine which
the King loved, and the rich coverings of chairs and footstools are all treated
with elaborate detail . Between the King and Queen stands Merytaten, the oldest
princess, with her arms affectionately round the necks of her sisters Meketaten
who was so soon to die and Ankhesenpaaten . On the floor are playing two
younger children, Nefer-neferu-aten-ta-shera ( the little Nefertiti ) and
Nefer-neferu-ra, whom she is chucking under the chin . Just a tiny fragment
shows that the baby of the family, Setepenra, is on her mother's lap . No more
delightful scene was ever painted ; the colours are as fresh as when they were
first laid on .
In the South-East corner of the building is what is practically a
separate suite of apartments . The most noticeable feature of these are the six
small rooms with broad niches at the back . Such rooms in other houses we know
to have been bedrooms, and it does not require an undue amount of imagination
to see here the night-nurseries of the six princesses ! . In another room in
the same block were found two paint-brushes of palm fibre, several fish-bones
for use as drawing quills, the ends still stained with colour, and a good deal
of raw paint . The floor was covered with irregular streaks where the brushes
had been wiped . It would be very nice to think of these brushes as those of
the King himself . We know how interested he was in art, and his
master-sculptor Bek tells us that His Majesty actually instructed him with his
own hands . Akhenaten would not be the last prince to dabble in painting and
probably to infuriate the professional artists with his suggestions .
East of the house is an open court from which there is access to the
garden, to the avenue of trees between the house and the Temple Hat-Aten, which
has here a private entrance for the King, and to the Royal Magazines (
storerooms ) . This latter great building is divided by open aisles into four
groups of a dozen or so long store-chambers . In the aisles are trees and on
special occasions a light pavilion might be set up . A representation of this
building occurs in the tomb of Meryra, in the scene where he is being rewarded
for his services . From this picture we learn the contents of these magazines (
storerooms ) . Some contain sealed wine jars, others ingots and bowls . Sacks
of valuables are stored here, beautiful vases of precious metals of foreign
workmanship, bales of cloth and linen-chests . One half is given over to food,
loaves of bread, grain, dried and split fish and sacks of spice . In places the
supports for the shelves still survive and some at least of the ancestral
treasure has come down to us, for here was found a splendid jar of alabaster,
containing 24½ hennu ( In Egyptian mythology,
the hennu boat was a symbol of the god Soker of Memphis . Depending on the era
or the prevailing dynasty of Egypt ), about three gallons, and inscribed with
the name of Queen Hatshepsut, who had been dead for more than a hundred years .
Part ( 7 ) .. Coming SoOoOon .....
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