Monday, August 7, 2017

The rock tombs of El Amarna .. The Tomb of Penehsy ( No. 6 ) – The Architectural Features .. Part ( 16 )

The last of the important tombs of the northern group is No. 6, that of Penehsy . its architectural features must have been almost exactly like those of Meryra I, consisting of a large hall, a second hall ( both columned ), and a shrine .



A. Architectural Features
The Exterior ( Plates 2, 5, 6 ) .



The tomb is excavated at the foot of the boldest of the rock-faces hereabout, though the full effect is lost by the base being buried under several feet of debris . As the tomb was at some period a place of Christian worship, there has been a considerable amount of Coptic building round its door . The wall of rock has been dressed to a fairly smooth surface for some distance to right and left of the doorway, a bank of rock being left along the foot . The entrance is adorned by a portal of the type already familiar . Both lintel and jambs are sculptured, but the latter are half cut away, and on the right an apse-shaped niche has been cut out by the Copts .




The Hall ( Plates 2, 3, 4 ) .


The exterior wall is of the customary solidity, and the thickness has been used for decorative purposes . The interior fulfils the Egyptian ideal by affording a suite of three chambers, the outer hall as a place of public gathering and worship, an inner chamber containing the place of interment, and a smaller shrine as a place of privacy for the deceased . If the plans be compared with those of Meryra it will be seen that, but for the addition of an antechamber to that tomb and the unfinished state of its inner rooms, the two are closely alike, the tomb of Penehsy having evidently been taken as a general model .




The first hall has been grievously injured through having been used as a church by the Copts, who have removed the two western columns of its four columns and substituted a kind of apse for the false door on the one side of the north wall which once balanced its fellow on the east side . This violence, combined with minor injuries and the wash of grey plaster with which the Copts obliterated the sculptures, has given a very sorry aspect to a hall which the bats, that pest of Egyptian tombs, have, on their part, not spared .



When fresh from the hands of the designers the hall was divided by two rows of two columns each, leaving about half the area of the hall between them . The walls were free for sculpture on all but the north side, where two false doors occupy half the space . This latter feature does not recur in any other of these tombs, unless the uncut doors in Meryra's ante-chamber and the false doors in the inner room of Ahmose represent it . Whether the portal now destroyed contained such a figure cannot be determined .



The columns differ little essentially, though a good deal in appearance, from those in Tomb of Meryra ( Plate 2-a ), for in the latter that detail was probably shown in paint which is here marked by the chisel . They are much more squat in appearance, being greater in girth though less in height . Here, too, each of the eight bundles of papyri which the column represents is again broken up above the sheathing leaves ( not sculptured here ) into four stems . About halfway between the foot and the bands under the capital there is a break, the thirty-two stems of which the column is now built up seeming to be shifted round by half a stem's breadth ( see drawing of east side ) . This, however, is due in reality to the customary insertion of shorter papyrus stems, three to each of the eight bundles . Each of these inserted stalks lies between the original stems and covers them . One out of the four stems in each of the eight bundles, however, is left visible and differentiated by being coloured yellow, while the inserted stems are painted conventionally, blue, red, blue . Thus there are thirty-two divisions, above as below, twenty-four of them representing the overlaid stems and eight those underlying . The representation, however, is not congruous with the conditions ; for it is a division between two stems, and not the surface of one stem, which forms the centre of a bundle of four and would be left uncovered by the inserted stems . This error appears plainly on the upper part of the capital, where the thirty-two original stems again become visible ; for that stem which was left uncovered is seen not to coincide with any of the thirty-two, but with a division between them . As the swelling capital represents the heads of the papyrus, the leaves of the calyx are represented like sheathing ( red lines on yellow ) on the eight underlying stems which are visible just above the bands . That the inserted stems consist of eight bundles of three is plain from the four bands which unite them ( coloured conventionally blue, red, green, blue, whereas the band of the column itself is a natural yellow ) . The colouring of these overlaid stems and their bands suggests that the architect was ignorant of their raison d'etre .



The details of the columns on the West face are interrupted by a blank space representing an affixed placard . The device on these tablets is similar to that on the lintels of the doorways, except that here a space below the cartouches is occupied by a design representing the union of the Southern and Northern kingdoms, under the symbol of their representative plants . The sign for " union " occupies the centre . The whole device on the North column is shown on Plate 4 and the ends of that on the South column .




It may be well to compare at this point the picture of a papyrus column from the temple on the West wall ( Plate 4 ) . It will be seen that the typical column of the artist was of very different proportions from those in the tomb . In reality the columns when built, not excavated, may have approached this pattern .



As will be seen from the photograph ( below ), even the remaining columns have been greatly mutilated . A number of cups have been cut in the base of the South column, to hold porous water-jars, with ducts for draining off the overflow into a basin in the floor. Of the destroyed columns only the abaci remain . The floor of the West half of the hall is very rough .



The gloom of the hall was once relieved by the brilliant colouring of the walls, the columns, the frieze of cartouches, the pediment and the ceiling . Of this but little now remains, but the ceiling designs have been recovered as far as possible . The scheme can be gathered from Plate 3, and the patterns identified from Plate 9 . Pattern B seems to be identical with pattern B of Plate 39-a, the blue centre, perhaps, excepted . What remains of the columns of hieroglyphs between the patterns will be found on Plate 21 .








The Inner Chamber
This is of the same shape, and almost of the same size as the outer hall . The ceiling is supported by four columns carrying architraves . These columns are of the papyrus-bud type like those of the hall, but no detail at all is shown, and even the contracting foot is not represented . A small pit in the centre of the room is obviously a subsequent addition .



The place of burial is reached by a stairway of forty-three steps, which descends along the East wall of the room . After reaching a landing some distance below, it turns at a sharp angle to the left, and descends as a curving stairway with a sharp return upon itself at the end . The chamber is merely a level length of passage . The depth below floor-level is shown on Plate 3 . The winding stairway is borrowed from the earlier tombs, and is not repeated in this necropolis .



The Shrine
The third room, conformably to practice, is inscribed, while the second hall ( theoretically only a passage to the burial chamber ) is not . The little chamber contained, according to custom, a sitting statue of Penehsy, but it has been completely perished .



The Sculpture
The work in the tomb, it must be confessed, was not good, and was, therefore, less able to bear injury . The figures have been executed for the most part in the stone itself, so that, despite the falling away of the thin coating of plaster, the sculpture still retains the general outline and, in places, almost the full measure of the original outline . Scarcely any plaster is left on the thickness of the outer walls, for instance, yet the scenes there are the best in the tomb . The plaster must have been a mere overlay, giving smoothness to the whole and filling up irregularities, as well as enabling details to be elaborated or supplied in colour . The stiff treatment of the designs also detracts from the value of the scenes, but this unattractiveness has been their salvation, the injury shown in Plate 7 being the only modern mutilation .




As the architecture, so the scheme of subjects also was taken over for the hall of Meryra ( with an exchange between the East and West walls ), but carried out there with much individuality and greatly superior technique . The two efforts show how varied was the skill of the artists, or the success of their methods of working in plaster .



Coptic Remains
When the Copts sought a place of assembly, the West false door, which they saw could be adapted to their needs with but little labour, seems to have drawn them to this tomb . Retaining the cornice of the original construction, they fashioned an apse having a moulded arch resting on pilasters with decorated capitals . The apse seems to have been designed with a view to baptismal immersion, for a font five feet deep occupies nearly the whole space . Two rough steps would enable a person to scramble from the edge into the inner room through a narrow aperture which has been cut in the back wall . But it is not easy to see how any one could be immersed in, or himself emerge from, the font with any dignity . There is a shallow niche in the walls of the apse on each side .





The apse having been made, it was impossible to leave the pagan sculptures close by it in naked assertiveness . Yet the earliest worshippers seem to have thought it enough to daub the sacred cross and an Alpha and Omega in red paint over the figure of the Queen . A later generation, however, was more particular, and, having covered the whole wall with plaster, ( now largely fallen away again ), decorated the surface with the picture of a saint and floral designs . The decorations in the apse, too, are not original, but have been renewed on a second coating of plaster from very similar designs . All the walls on this side of the hall have been covered in like manner with a thin wash of plaster, which on the West wall has adhered with deplorable tenacity . Above the cornice there seems to have been a bird with outspread wings, not, perhaps, without reminiscences of the winged scarab, disc, or vulture . On each side of the apse are decorated staves (?) .






The wall of the apse is painted gray, with darker marbling . Separating it from the dome are two borders, the lower showing two inter-twisted bands ( Plate 6,c ), the upper a branching spray of leaf and fruit (d) . The latter design is also applied to the soffit of the arch (a, b) . The moulding of the arch is coloured yellow with a band of white splotches on a black background . The dome is occupied by the figure of a soaring eagle (?) sketched in browns of various shades . Its outstretched wings are tripartite ( in allusion to the seraph of Isaiah's vision ? ), and on its head is a halo or disc ( perhaps also a reminiscence of the solar hawk ) . It is much broken, and none of the graffiti here can be read. The lower of the two borders is continued on the wall to the left of the apse . Below this a singular decoration, viz. a disc of deep blue glass about five inches across, was added, set in a bedding of mud-plaster, but at a later time was covered over again . A cupboard has been cut out in the wall hard by .




Having made their apse in the extreme corner of the hall, the unsuitability of such a position became evident, and to make it central to the congregation the tomb was considerably enlarged on this side for half its height, and the two columns broken away to admit light . Several grooves in the wall and floor suggest that a partition was erected outside the line of the architrave . Other relics of this occupation are the arched recess in the South wall near the entrance and a similar one outside . To judge by the putlog holes and a deep recess in the East wall, the stairway was bridged over and the space behind the columns put to some special use . It may be added that the spectacle of a Christian church thus quartered in a heathen tomb may still be seen under very similar conditions at Deir Rifeh .



On the South wall of the inner room are painted two crosses with the Alpha and Omega in the corners, and one or two indecipherable words or symbols . To the Copts is probably also due a strange squaring out of the West side of the South wall, and a still more irregular marking out of the West wall . All this is in black paint .





Part ( 17 ) The Sculptured Scenes in the Tomb of Penehsy .. Coming SoOoOon .....
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