Sunday, July 2, 2017

El-Amarna - The public buildings .. Penehsy House – Records Office – The Great Palace – The Kings Palace – The Royal Magazines .. Part ( 6 )

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 .





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