Wednesday, August 9, 2017

El-Amarna - The southern group of the rock tombs .. Part ( 18 )

1.  Situation :-
We now move southwards towards the southern group of tombs, they are located off three miles from the south of the northern group . On our way we notice, about the centre of the arc formed by the high desert behind the city, a long and narrow promontory jutting out from the high ground, and enclosing at its broader western point a small hollow .


On the slopes of this promontory, and in the bottom of its valley, the expedition of the Egypt Exploration Society noticed brickwork, and excavation speedily revealed that the traces of brickwork on the slopes were the remains of a series of tomb-chapels belonging to middle-class citizens of Akhetaten, and were of a somewhat later date than that of the city's flourishing period under Akhenaten, probably coinciding with the later stages under Smenkhkere and Tutankhamun, when the Amun faith was recovering the prestige and power which it had lost under Akhenaten .

The tomb-shafts belonging to these chapels are not in their enclosures, but on the slopes above them . The brickwork in the hollow proved to be the remains of a workman's village, and is probably to be regarded as a special home provided for the workmen who executed the great rock-tombs in the cliffs above . It is surrounded by the remains of an encircling wall, with very limited means of exit . Patrol-roads encircled it on three sides, and guard-houses were placed on the main road from it to Akhetaten .

The wall cannot have been for defence . It was not designed to keep enemies out, but to keep workmen in . The solution is probably to be found in the notorious character for riot and violence which the tomb-workers in general held, and of which documentary evidence exists with regard, at least, to the necropolis of Thebes .

It is curious that the bold cliffs themselves were not selected as a site for the earliest tombs at Akhetaten, but a low bank which marks the rise from the level of the plain to that of the great wady running southward through the mountains . The rock is of the worst possible nature ; the site was limited in area and lay an hour's ride south-east of the city . Hence after a few years it was abandoned for the northern cliffs . These unattractive hills are bounded on the East and West by two Khors ( drainage valleys ) and are cut into three parts by dry water-courses, descending from the level of the wady .

The southern group of tombs ( 7 to 25 ) lies, as already mentioned, on a low bank near to the point at which the hill-road makes its exit from the Amarna plain .








2.  Number :-
Of the tombs excavated here, nineteen are usually open and have been numbered ;  but there are others in a greater or less state of completion, of which eight appear on the accompanying map ( Plate 13 ) . All the tombs are liable to become sanded-up, so that many of the numbered tombs had to be excavated in order to secure plans . The eight lettered tombs were completely hidden and were cleared of sand by Norman de Garis Davies . Most of them had been unearthed before by MM. Urbain Bouriant and Alexandre Barsanti, but no records or plans seem to have been made . The tombs are betrayed at once by the piles of stone fragments thrown out ; so that it is almost impossible that any large chamber remains undiscovered, though there might be many of the type 9b, 9c . There are also many small cuttings where a tomb was planned or whence stone was taken for inset ( patchings, cornices, etc. ), and these no doubt have caused disappointment to others . Of the tombs which Mr. Norman de Garis Davies opened only 7c was of any size, and none showed any traces of inscription except 25a .



3.  Previous Records :-
The buried state of these tombs, consequent on their low position, kept them unknown or uncopied long after their first discovery . They seem to have been unvisited by Sir John Gardner Wilkinson , as Robert Hay,who shared with him the knowledge of the tombs of El Til, refers to the conspicuous tomb of Ay as " the tomb opened by me " . Tomb 13 also was opened by him and his companion G. Laver in 1830, as he records on its ceiling ; and tombs 7 and 8 were entered, and such copying and planning done as were possible under the circumstances . Nestor L'Hôte did very little work here . The great advance which Mr. Karl Richard Lepsius made on Hay was more in the publication than in the extent of his copies ; for though the entrances of most of the other tombs were plain to him, he made no attempt to penetrate into them . The work done by French Egyptologists on the site between 1883 and 1902 has already been noted . The result of their combined labours, long delayed owing to the illness and death of M. Bouriant, has now appeared, so far as the south group is concerned .


4.  Change of Necropolis :-
The transference of the Necropolis to the northern hills presents us with an unsolved problem : for the material changes that coincided with it suggest that it had real significance . The new and stricter name of the Aten comes into use ; the form of tombs undergoes considerable alteration ; the Queen's sister disappears ; detailed pictures of the temple are shown and those of the palace are altered ; the figure of the deceased takes the place of the King in the doorways . None of these changes is startling ; none perhaps was sudden ; yet, taken together, they show that the 8th or 9th year of the reign marked a turning-point . Probably it exhibited in some definite way the success of the revolution : only a very partial and short-lived success, no doubt ; yet not to be a failure was already much .

It may well be supposed that up to this point all had been in doubt . Now ( surely by a compromise ) civil peace was assured . The city had been solidly founded ; the temple and the palace erected ; the boundaries of the sacred district solemnly confirmed ; the Queen's sister married off, in a way, perhaps, that had political results ; a new influx from Thebes was changing somewhat the first fashions in which the King's influence and local mannerisms had been unchallenged . All this is hypothetical ; but some such change, important yet not radical, seems indicated .


5.  Architecture :-
The originality so marked at this epoch in other directions is not less prominent in tomb architecture . There was a complete break from the traditions of Theban tombs both in form and in mode of decoration . The ordinary T-shaped chamber is unknown at El Amarna, and so also is decoration in colour on plaster. Papyrus columns everywhere replace the square pillar of rock where support is needed for the roof . If Akhenaten fails to win our admiration away from the bright colour and rich detail of the Theban tomb, his architecture, at least, is in the highest degree imposing, especially in the Southern Group, where the larger tombs almost reach the dignity of rock-temples . There is no other necropolis like this in Egypt . Beside the solid masonry of Saqqara, the magnificent simplicity of Beni-Hasan, the rich colouring of Thebes, must be set the graceful architecture of the tombs of El-Hagg Qandil . The row of complex columns finishing at the wall in pilasters with cavetto-cornice, and carrying either a simple or a corniced architrave, is an architectural element which, by its harmonious blending of straight lines with curves and of the plain with the broken surface, may bear comparison with features of classical architecture that have become imperishable models . The breaking of the plain wall-surface by double corniced portals, or by the door and lattice, also shows admirable decorative taste, and we can only regret that no free-standing building remains in Akhetaten . Unfortunately the period was so short and the work so hurried that we have to complete the tombs in imagination . One and all they remain sketches which show the restless genius of the artist; and if there seems no great variety of type, no more indeed than indicates that the type was variable, we must remember that the tombs of the group appear to be the product of two or three years at most .


6.  Tomb-forms :-
The most natural impulse in tomb-quarrying is to gain wall-space with least labour . To this the corridor answers best . It might lie athwart the entrance or in line with it, and though the latter arrangement had the advantage of taking small frontage space, the cross corridor was generally adopted, as it secured room for expansion . In the South group only tombs 18, 19 and 23 adopted the direct corridor . It was imitated in tombs 3 and 5, but there the cross-corridor ( with false doors ) was added at the further end, thus forming an exact T-shaped .

The smallest tombs are all of the cross-corridor type, with a false door ( shrine ) at each end and another opposite the entrance ( tombs 7, 11, 17 ) . If time and means permitted, the breadth of the corridor was doubled, the back wall becoming a row of columns down the centre ( commenced in Nos. 10, 12, 20; nearly completed in 7c, 13 ) . Or it might be trebled or quadrupled by having two rows of columns ( Nos. 8, 14, 16 ) or three ( No. 25 ) . Two false doors to right and left on entering still bore witness to the embryo-form, though these might be repeated in the new cross-aisle ( Nos. 8, 16 ) . Not that the development actually took place in successive strips . After the cross-corridor was finished the central aisle might be run out to its limit, and the excavation begun to right and left ( Nos. 21, 22 ) .

The simple cross-corridor tomb was, however, not really complete . It had no place for burial ( only a shaft in the chamber in tomb 11 ), and it was intended that the door in the back wall should lead to a further room, in which or through which the burial place should be reached . In the tomb of Mahu ( No. 9 ) this room was left quite simple and small . In Nos. 8 and 15 this inner room was meant to become a many-columned chamber . Where the cross-corridor had become a columned hall, it was felt advisable to begin the burial place at once, placing it at the end of a flight of steps leading down from the floor ( in the left-hand back corner, Nos. 8, 13, 14, 16, 25 ) . If the stairway was extensive, it was made to turn on itself so as to keep within the area of the tomb . The stairway, when in the second chamber, was on the right ( Nos. 6, 9, 15 ) .


7.  Sequence :-
It is difficult to determine the order of succession of the tombs in this group . The Princesses are always three in number, except in tombs 9 and 11 where Merytaten alone appears . Reasons will be given for doubting if these two tombs can really date as early as Akhenaten's fifth or sixth year . All the tombs therefore seem to be practically of one period, and we are unable to suggest with confidence any sequence among them . Tombs 8 and 23 show examples of the later form of the name of the Aten, and tomb 9 uses no other . These, then, we should expect to be latest in date .


8.  Methods of Construction :-
As will be seen in dealing with separate tombs, they are all more or less unfinished, and the decoration of all is seriously incomplete . Evidently the work was done in the utmost haste . The shrewd king seems to have seen that the best way to bind his courtiers to Akhetaten and to his enterprise there was to let them see their future halls of burial already planned on an elaborate scale and actually begun . A tomb was invariably quarried from the roof downwards, and to the last the ceiling remained the most finished and accurate portion ; so that the modern surveyor is obliged to adopt the laborious and inverted method of taking the ceiling as the basis of his plans . The reason for this is not far to seek . When one tomb was begun before its neighbour had been completed, it was advisable that the latter should have marked out its claim to frontage by excavating the whole breadth within . This is in fact always found to have been done, even if the tomb was left unfinished in the rear ( Nos. 14, 22, 25, etc. ) .

A further peculiarity of these tombs is that they were evidently finished piecemeal as the work went on ; the last smoothness and detail were given to the ceilings, architraves, cornices of doors, and capitals of columns, while the other half of the tomb, the column, the doorway, was still a mass of rock . The explanation, however, is not that, owing to a childish impatience to reach pleasing results or in order to avoid the use of scaffolding, the tomb was completed in sections : this feature is the direct result of the conditions under which the work was done . So hasty was it, so insecure the supply of labour, so remote the chance of completion, that the most expeditious method was the only method . The plasterers moulded and whitewashed the capitals of columns regardless of the fact that the shaft was still unformed and that their work would be seriously impaired, if not destroyed, should the excavation ever be proceeded with . The decorators and sculptors, who found a properly smoothed wall, sketched out, sculptured and painted their scenes, though half the chamber, or all save the doorway, was still virgin rock . This procedure has been justified . But for this unmethodical haste there could have been no architectural beauty and no texts or scenes in the necropolis ; for not a single tomb reached completion, and only in two cases are even the interiors perfectly ready for decoration . This must be remembered in appreciating architectural features, and not less in drawing conclusions from the scenes . No evidence can be gathered from the absence of certain representations, for the subjects which would have occupied the remaining walls are unknown to us . As a matter of fact all the pictures we have in this group, with the exception of those in the tomb of Mahu and one in the tomb of May, are three separate versions of the same design, showing the reward of the official from the window of the palace ( Tombs 7, 8, 25 ) .

The tombs and their sculptures lie open also to the charge of being " jerry-built " ; for the material in which they are excavated is quite unsuited to their ambitious designs . The admirable lines of cornice and column and the fine detail of sculpture are all executed in plaster . The stone basis for both is often of the roughest description . Many of the columns, owing to faults and fissures in the rock, are largely made up of plaster . No doubt a great deal of bad work, due to haste, has also been covered up in this way . But the Egyptian work in plaster was so excellent, and the insecure basis for this rock-architecture is so little to be suspected even now, that the passing centuries must be considered to have sufficiently vindicated the ancient architect .


9.  Later Burials :-
Most, if not all, of the tombs have been re-used for later burials, bones and great mounds of sherds outside the principal tombs witnessing eloquently to the fact . Large numbers of coffins were, I believe, found by the first excavators, many being burnt and others removed to Cairo . No notes of this Departmental undertaking have been published .


10.         Roads :-

As in the North group, broad tracks, swept clear of stones, lead from the vicinity of the ancient town to many of the chief tombs . They are marked for a certain distance, but after three or four hundred yards from the tombs they visibly swerve from the straight line and often bend considerably, perhaps because several ran into one . Their full mapping remains to be done .





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