Sunday, July 2, 2017

El-Amarna - The public buildings .. The Small Temple – The Temple Magazines – Maru-Aten – The North Palace .. Part ( 7 )

In connection with the King's House was the smaller temple – the Chapel Royal one might almost call it – of Hat-Aten . The main entrance to this is on the Royal Road, but, as we have seen, the King had a private entrance from his own house, and so had the priests from their quarters to the South .




The temenos wall which surrounds it is considerably thicker than that of the Great Temple and is heavily buttressed every fifteen yards . The pylon towers are very well preserved with the slots for the two tall flagstaffs which fronted each . The entrance was paved with stone . This has all been taken, though the imprint of the mason's marks can be seen in the plaster bedding below .




Immediately within the entrance lies a brick chapel or altar flanked by rows of brick offering tables . Sphinxes may have guarded the approach, for there are two oblong bases strengthened with stone as if to bear a heavy weight . On the inner face of the wall stelae were set .






Another set of pylon towers led to the second court and a third to the court of the Sanctuary .



Against the outer wall-face of the latter is a small building with a brick altar in the front room . This may be the house of the priest on duty . The Sanctuary itself is exactly like that in the Great Temple . It was built of rubble walls faced with stone and has been even more badly treated, for not one single stone remains in situ . Here again we see a raised central way flanked by offering tables leading, through a door with a screen wall to shut out a view, into the court of the High Altar, open to the sky and surrounded by chapels . The fragments of columns and statues in fine-grained limestone imply that there was a colonnade of the same type as in the Great Temple .






All round the Sanctuary is an ambulatory with an avenue of trees, while small buildings occupy part of the court South of the Sanctuary . It is possible that we have a representation of Hat-Aten in the tomb of Tutu, for his picture alone shows avenues of trees in connection with a Temple .



South of the Small Temple lie the Priests' Quarters, the Temple store-houses and the Sacred Lake . The store-houses lie to the West . There is a big open court off which an open gangway leads . On either side of the gangway are long rooms, magazines ( storerooms ), glass furnaces and bakeries . East of these are further store-rooms with a large sunken stone press, and East again a small compact house with two bedrooms and a number of robing-rooms with shelves . Last of all comes the Lake .




This then was the royal Estate . But the King had other residences, and the most important of these was Maru-Aten, the precinct of the Southern Pool . This pleasure-palace or Paradise lies opposite the village of El-Hawata, nearly a mile South of the South end of the city .



Here are two large rectangular enclosures, lying side by side . There was a great entrance pavilion with columned halls and a throne-room . Behind this lay a small lake surrounded by a garden with trees and shrubs . At the back of this seems to have been the chief gardener's house . From the garden a small door leads into the larger enclosure . Along the West side of this, screened off by a wall, ran a row of buildings for workmen, while just outside the enclosure is a building which, from the skeletons of greyhounds found there, may well have been the Royal Kennels .




Most of the Northern enclosure, however, was taken up by a great pleasure lake over a hundred and twenty yards long and half as broad . Out into this ran a stone quay with an ornamental gate at the end decorated with painted reliefs and steps leading down into the water . The lake was surrounded by a garden and must have been the scene of such picnics as we see depicted on the walls of the tombs of Theban grandees . Though only about three feet deep the water was quite sufficient to float the light pleasure craft while shallow enough not to be dangerous should a boat capsize . Among the trees and flower-beds lay other buildings .




To the North were perhaps the retiring-rooms of the King with a dais for a throne beneath a baldaquin, a bedroom and a small central court surrounded by pillars . Here were flower-boxes, mud compartments filled with garden mould . On either side of a columned hall behind were wine-cellars, containing " very good wine of the Western river " or of the " House of Akhenaten " .





In the North-East corner of the enclosure was the water court . This consisted of one long room, its roof supported by square pillars . Down the centre run a series of T-shaped tanks, the heads of the T's being alternately North and South, so that between the arms of each pair was left a square base for the pillar . The sloping sides of the tanks were painted white up to the surface of the water and above this with brightly coloured water plants, lotoses and water-lilies which must have looked as if they were actually growing out of the water . The low parapets were similarly decorated, while the pavement itself consists of a series of frescoed panels showing all kinds of wild plants from which startled flights of duck arise, and brakes of papyrus amongst which cattle are plunging .




From this water court a formal garden runs South to the small temple and kiosks . An artificial canal had been cut round to form an island on which stood a kiosk and two small pavilions . South of this appears to be a chapel which is of unusual shape in having a court surrounded by a colonnade, a pronaos with four columns and a sanctuary also with columns . But so little of the original was left that it is possible that this reconstruction is at fault .



The North Palace, which lies just over a mile North of the Great Temple, is a building unique in the ancient world . It has every appearance of having been a kind of Zoological Gardens where the King could watch animals and birds and satisfy his love of nature .




There is a great court in the centre of the building mainly occupied by an artificial lake . At the back of this are two columned halls which led to a small throne-room at the East end .



The North side of the Palace is divided into three parts . To the West lies an open court with a chapel and altars in the middle . Then comes an enclosure for animals . The stone mangers found here are carved with reliefs of cattle and antelopes . The North-Eastern corner is occupied by a garden surrounded by a colonnade . Below the colonnade are a series of rooms, some of which from their decoration seem to have been aviaries .







The South side is likewise divided into three parts ; two appear to be for servants and officials, while the third, in the South-Eastern corner, may conceivably have been a suite for the Queen . It is noteworthy that a corridor which runs through the King's apartments has a flight of steps at each end so as to command a view of the aviary at the North and the harem quarters to the South . But the North Palace is most famous for its frescoes of bird life in the marshes, the freshness of which is unparalleled even at Amarna . To these we shall return when the time comes to discuss the art of the period .








No doubt other Royal residences existed which will in time be excavated . ( In London, for instance, the King has Buckingham Palace, St. James's Palace, Kensington Palace and the Tower ) . There is, for instance, no building yet discovered which would house the princesses once they had grown up and had households of their own . Indeed the King's house in the Central City is a real home and gives us an extraordinary sense of intimacy with the family life which we can certainly not obtain from the sprawling ruins of Amenhotep III's palace at Thebes .



But enough has been said to indicate the character of the public buildings of the city and it is time to turn to the private residences .





Part ( 8 ) .. Coming SoOoOon .....
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