Wednesday, July 26, 2017

The rock tombs of El Amarna .. The Tomb of Ahmose ( No. 3 ) .. Part ( 13 )

A. Historical Notes

We now cross the mouth of the valley which here divides the northern group into two, and proceed south-eastwards along the cliffs to the Tomb No. 3, which is that of Ahmose, who was Veritable Scribe of the King, Fan-bearer on the right hand of the King, Superintendent of the Court-house, and Steward of the House of Akhenaten, a very important and confidential servant of the Pharaoh indeed, and closely attached to his person .
In spite of his position, however, his tomb lay unfinished through half the reign of Akhenaten . The tomb has been laid out with considerable accuracy, but its scenes have only been very partially completed . The tomb is situated a short distance West of the tomb of Meryra, the high-priest ; it faces South-West . There being a corner of steep cliff at this point, only a small amount of quarrying had to be done to gain a vertical face of the required height . The space so levelled, and enlarged by the debris cast out from the excavation, was occupied in later times for shelters, the stone walls of which still cumber the spot .



B. Architectural Features
Exterior ( Plates 26, 27 ) — The entrance portal, on each side of which the wall of rock has been dressed for a corresponding height, consists of a simple framing slightly recessed ( Plate 27 ), and decorated with inscriptions in the style already familiar . It will be noticed that in the cartouches of Ra-Aten the early spelling of the name of the sun-god by means of the disc-crowned hawk is employed ; as also the differentiation of the two determinatives of the word "father" above them . The doorway has been mutilated by the cutting of a fanlight over it by some later occupier, and more recently by the removal of a large part of the left jamb .




Interior . Wall Thicknesses ( Plates 28, 29, 38 ) — On the west wall thickness is the beautiful prayer which is now so well known, in which Ahmose prays for Akhenaten that the Aten will " give to him very many jubilees, with years of peace . Give him of that which thine heart desireth, to the extent that there is sand on the shore, that fishes in the stream have scales, and cattle have hair . Let him sojourn here until the swan turneth black, until the raven turneth white, until the hills arise to depart, until water floweth upstream, while I continue in attendance on the Good God [ Pharaoh ], until he assigneth me the burial that he granteth " . Both sides of the entrance once contained the figure and inscription customary in this situation, executed in the best style of the period and brightly coloured . But they were cut to pieces in the great theft of inscriptions which was made for the purpose of sale in 1893 ( Plate 37 ) . Fortunately the texts are in most instances recoverable from earlier copies and photographs . The ceiling here retains portions of the painted design and something, in parts, of the original brightness of colour .







The Hall ( Plates 26, 38 ) — This has the form of a lengthy corridor, the further end of which is entirely taken up with the doorway to the inner chambers and its corniced framing ( Plate 38 ) . The ceiling, which at the South end is strongly arched, becomes almost flat at the other . Two recesses cut in the East wall bear witness to the use of the tomb as a dwelling .



The Inner Rooms — The further door gives access by a short passage in the wall to a second corridor at right angles to the former, containing the place of sepulture . The burial shaft descends from a bank of rock at the East end ; though partially filled, it is open to a depth of nearly thirty feet. At the other end of the corridor a few feet of a second and perhaps later shaft have been cut in the floor . At each end of the corridor an imitation portal has been hewn in the wall behind the shaft . They are out of place here, being taken over from the class of tomb where this cross corridor formed the main hall ( Plate 14-c ) . A doorway in the axis of the tomb leads from this corridor to the shrine, and the ceiling is here heightened to give the aspect of a central aisle . The portal of the shrine ( Plate 27 ) is of the kind already met with in the tomb of Huya ( Plate 19 ), but has been left unfinished . A mistake was made by cutting insets in the transom and filling them with the dad signs, columns, and sa or signet signs, which should have been put in the panels above . They were afterwards obliterated with plaster, but are now partially revealed . The shrine contains the usual seated statue of the deceased man : it appears to have been as well executed as the material permitted, but has been badly mutilated . A rough basin has been cut in the floor before it, as if for purposes of libation . The roof is arched . Pivot-holes in the floor of the entrance show that the chamber was closed by folding doors .






The whole tomb is laid out with great accuracy, and the walls are cut true and smooth . In the outer corridor the wall-surfaces were given a fine coating of plaster, but the decoration which they were meant to receive was only very partially applied . On the East side some traces of red paint indicate the King, Queen, and three princesses under the radiant sun . All the rest is blank, and the clean surface proving too great a temptation to visitors in the days of the Ptolemies, they scratched their names over the whole space ( see Plate 35 ) . On the West side the greater part of the upper of the two designs which were projected is preserved to us in ink or sculpture, and also a fragment of the lower . The remaining space is covered with graffiti . All the walls are remarkably free from dirt .



C. The Sculptured Scenes
1 — The Prayers of Ahmose - The Thickness of the Outer Wall . ( Plates 28, 29 ) .
The two figures of Ahmose which occur here show the usual dress . His decorations are few, consisting only of a double row of gold beads round his neck ; but he carries on his back the insignia of his offices, secured to a strap which passes over his shoulder . The fan indicates his position as fan-bearer on the right hand of the King ; the long-bladed military axe shows the command of soldiery which this and his other offices necessarily involved, or rendered him liable to .




2 - A Royal Visit to the Temple - West Wall : Upper half . ( Plates 30 to 32, 32A, 39 ) .
The greater part of this picture is preserved . On the extreme right it was never even sketched, or has utterly faded away . The royal chariot ( Plate 32 ) is partially preserved in the original red ink sketch . The soldiers ( Plate 31 ) are finished with extreme care and are well-preserved, though somewhat injured by the casting and squeezing to which the scene has been subjected . The temple ( Plate 30 ) as far as the second pylon and the division below it is but half-finished, and has besides had large parts cut away by thieves . The existence of the rest of the picture was not suspected, as the surface is to all appearance quite blank . But chance observation showed me that parts of the design at least had survived, yet in a yellow ink which had conformed so exactly to the colour of the wall that it could only be recovered by blindly following the lines on the wall with a pencil, guided less by their colour than their texture .








The drawing thus recovered is the frequent one of a state visit to the sanctuary of the royal statues in the temple, though we are not aware of anything in the career or offices of Ahmose which could be an occasion for its insertion here . Its prototype seems plainly to be the scene in the tomb of Mahu, though the design is considerably altered, and was still further changed for the tombs of Penehsy and Meryra ( Plates 10-a, 10A-a, 13-b ) .







The lost part probably showed Ahmose and his attendants, or perhaps the other two princesses and their train . The horses which draw the royal chariot have been sketched with great freedom, the head and neck showing great superiority of outline over other designs . The initial sketch seems to have been in faint yellow ink, corrected and redrawn in red ; but both have had to be used in Plate 32, and this, taken with the indistinctness of the lines in parts, must do some injustice to the Egyptian artist . The figures of the royal personages were rubbed out in the general defacement of the monuments after the King's death, and they have had to be restored ( Plate 32A ) by help of the design of Mahu, The King and Queen are represented as chatting face to face in the car, while the little Merytaten, whose head reaches with difficulty over the rim, is interested in the prancing horses .



The chariot is immediately preceded by a troop of foot-soldiers, who run in two detachments, headed by a trumpeter ( Plates 31, 39 ) . Although the habits of Egyptian draughtsmen preclude easy confidence that an actual military organization is revealed here, there is a mixture of symmetry and divergence which strongly suggests that knowledge, and not caprice, has guided the artist . Since Ahmose had some military command or supervision, he may well have excluded professional blunders .




It is clear that the four files contain ten men each, the last man being an Egyptian armed with falchion and baton ; the eleventh man in the three lower rows is manifestly an officer, holding a baton only ; in the top row the corresponding place has evidently been vacated by the trumpeter, who must be in charge of the whole escort . The rear men of the files thus seem here to take the place of our non-commissioned officers ; elsewhere they are not so employed, but either in regiments or on police duty . They may have been a crack regiment appointed to positions of trust, and placed here as a rear guard or as instructors to the irregular troops .



The detachments seem to be composite . Each is led by six Egyptian spearmen, and the standard-bearers of the six regiments they represent . There follow them representative soldiers of the non-Egyptian regiments, which were perhaps attached to the native regiments in equal numbers ( or in half their strength ) . In the upper detachment we see two bearded Syrian spearmen, a negro bowman, a Libyan archer with characteristically shaped bow, an Egyptian sergeant (?) whose presence here breaks the symmetry, and a second negro with a club . In the lower detachment are three Syrian spearmen, two Ethiopian bowmen, and a negro with a club ; all of similar appearance to those above . Each officer is thus in charge of ten men, a favourite military unit .



The standards are of the five types which occur in these tombs . It seems most reasonable to assign them to the six ( or twelve ) Egyptian regiments ; for the pictures do not enable us to allot distinctive standards to the foreign corps . It will be noticed that some of the standard-bearers, here and elsewhere, have a different dress from the rest .



As in Plate 10A-a, the cortege is met at the gate of the temple by the military guard and by the officials, who approach presenting bouquets and offering sacrificial birds and cattle ( Plate 30 ) . Other beasts await acceptance in the inner court, close by the slaughter-house . All is astir within the temple, servants running through the great gates of the courts in haste to make ready for the royal visit .



The building here depicted is the temple enclosure, but with the whole of the Greater Sanctuary absent . It seems that this is due only to economy of space, the Smaller Sanctuary being the object of visit . The absence of any traces of the walls of this building in the ruins of the temple might make one suspect that the pictures of the Great Sanctuary in the tombs of Meryra and Panehesy only represent the unexecuted plans which were in the hands of these priests, and that it was in reality never carried out . But in face of the extensive building in the city and the mention of several shrines in the temple of the Aten, this is scarcely likely, and the early tomb of Mahu shows an elevation of the great pylon which it would be hard to explain away ( Plates 20-c, 21-c ) .





The first gateway is the outermost entrance ; the second, as the lavers, the choir, and the great royal statue show, is the gateway which admits to the court of the Lesser Sanctuary ; and the third is the gateway of that building . There is no essential divergence in this picture from the other plans .



The space between the first and second gateways ( down to the bottom of the Plate ) is, then, that occupied already or destined to be occupied by the Great Sanctuary . Some of the objects seen here are afterwards shown in that building, and the two sets of lavers seem by their position to imply its existence . The mutilation of the wall prevents us from knowing if the great altar was shown, but duplicate pictures and the presence of an altar of another type make it very unlikely . We may also note the player on the lute and his chorus, who here supplement the harpers' choir in the inner court .



3 - The Royal Family at Home - West Wall : Lower Scenes . ( Plates 33, 34 ) .






Of the scene which was destined to cover this part of the long west wall, only a small part of the ink design was ever carried out with the chisel, and what was unexecuted is erased . The sculpture too has been defaced in ancient, and again in recent times . From the little that remains, it seems likely that the picture was connected with Ahmose' office as chamberlain ; for the existing fragment shows the royal family seated at meat in the hall of the palace . The remainder would probably have depicted Ahmose waiting on his sovereign, the reward of his assiduity in this office, and perhaps the congratulations received by him at home on this mark of favour . The contemporary tomb of Pentu is somewhat similarly illustrated, but equally unfinished and injured . It has a scene in which the royal pair are seen at meat, and another in which they sit in the hall, as here, and bestow rewards on their servant ( Plates 8-c, 10-c ) .





This picture of the palace differs in certain respects from the pictures already seen, being founded plainly on designs that belong to the period of the southern tombs . The picture as preserved to us begins with the great hall of the palace with its three ( i.e. six ? ) columns . If the drawing resembles that in the sister tomb, the loggia and porch were shown outside the hall . But where the rays of the sun, falling as usual upon the royal pair, break through the upper line of the building ( at once roof and side-wall ) a similar window has been placed, cleverly indicating the means by which the sun-light streamed into the actual palace .



In this hall the King and Queen sat at meat on high-backed chairs before piles of viands ( traces in paint ) . The chair of the King is adorned by the symbol of the union of South and North Egypt in fretwork . The King is attacking a bird, while the Queen deals with a joint of formidable proportions ( the reverse in Plate 4 ). Attendants serve at side-tables ( below ) and a cupbearer is holding out a goblet to the Queen . Three princesses are present, the youngest of whom sits on her mother's knee, while her two elders eat from their own table beside the Queen's chair . Fragments of the King's and Queen's names remain ; those of the princesses are lost . A row of wine-jars ( now destroyed ) is shown on the farther side . Behind the chair of the Queen ( Plate 33 ) stand attendants, two or three nurses for the children and the palace string-band of female performers ( cf. Plates 5, 7, 32-b ) .










Behind the hall was a corridor which separated it from the more private rooms ; it is here divided into two parts entered separately, each admitting to a suite of rooms beyond . They form :-

I – The Harem
A.  The Royal Suite, comprising :-
1)  A dining-room, entered by three doors ( the centre one decorated ; the side doors for servants to come and go quietly ) . It contains two sets of water-jars, a chair in front of a table of meats and flowers, and several small stands ( Hay ) . Separated from it by another corridor are three rooms .
2)  A bedroom aired by the malqaf ( cf. Plates 13, 18-a ) and containing articles of the toilet, refreshments, and a high couch reached by steps and furnished with luxurious bedding and a head-rest .



3)  A columned room, entered from a similar but unfurnished ante-room ; perhaps a retiring room, as meat and drink as well as sandals are shown in it .
4)  Two small rooms, entered through a columned antechamber, appear to be pantries ; as servants are carrying empty jars in corresponding rooms in the lower suite . The raised platforms serve as chests, for we see in one case the lifted cover .
B.  The Women's Apartments :– Here we see a number of figures, probably all female, and though the group has suffered greatly, a help to restoration is afforded by a design in the tomb of Ay . Two women play the lute, one dancing the while, one the lyre and one the harp . The feet of a fourth woman are seen who apparently sits on the ground and leans against the knees of a companion .
II - The Men's Apartments — As this division is almost an exact counterpart of the sets of rooms ( 3 ) and ( 4 ) above, we conclude that it is the men's side of the house .

Plate 33 exhibits an interesting feature in connection with the vault of heaven, which, as is customary, is stretched above the scene, its ends resting upon the shoulders of the mountains . At their foot a tree and a shrub are placed . This tree occurs again in a similar position on a block of this date from Karnak in Cairo Museum, and also in the tomb of Ay . M. Gaston Maspero recognizes in this tree one of the two " sycomores of malachite " which grew at the spot where the sun entered and left the upper world .






Part ( 14 ) .. Coming SoOoOon .....
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