A History of Ancient Egypt: From the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid by Romer John

Author:Romer, John [Romer, John]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Publisher: St. Martin's Press
Published: 2013-08-19T22:00:00+00:00

An image of a storehouse engraved upon the Narmer Palette

There is no archaeological evidence, however, within this considerable ruin, of the presence of a military garrison; nor indeed of any conflict or destruction at the site. Like so many of the splendid architectures of later periods of ancient history that are identified as fortresses, the structure appears to have embodied the resources and the order of the state, at once powerful and protective, in much the same way as the enclosures and great tombs at Saqqara and Abydos.

This architecture, though, was for the living. That it was set directly and without regard over the flimsy dwellings of the earlier settlement – the fortress’s western wall cut over and across the entrance of an ancient shrine – also signals the blunt intrusion of external authority into an established community; a feature that once again it shares with several other contemporary buildings in the Nile Valley and in the delta. At Aswan, however, and uniquely, it not only marks the southernmost extent of the pharaonic transport network but, as the debris of their workshops implies, the establishment of a state settlement in which families of craftsmen worked hard stone. Both the products of these workshops and the stores that kept the craftsmen and their families supplied with grain and copper, food and tools, seem to have been held inside the fortress’s imponent walls.

By the mid-Second Dynasty, so its German archaeologists have shown, the size of the island fortress had been doubled, a wall and tower having been added to its entrance gate and two further walls built out from the fortress’s northern end, to run some eighty yards down along the edges of the narrowing island and meet at its tip. Inside this new-made triangle of space, the walls enclosed a series of simple mud-brick dwellings all laid out within a carefully measured grid, just as many later pharaonic building projects would be throughout the following millennia. On Elephantine, the grid held just two rows of houses with at least twenty family plots in them, each one a little over sixteen and a half feet wide and twice as deep; or, as the state’s contemporary surveyors would have expressed it, in the traditional units that were related to the human forearm, plots that were eleven cubits wide and some twenty-two cubits deep.

As well as houses, this grid also accommodated at least six communal spaces, the largest of which was about 150 square feet whilst others were so small that they could only have served as grain bins or cupboards. Some of these spaces were roofed, others left as open yards. Inside the individual housing units, though each of them shared common dividing walls, every one was of a different plan. Those rooms with small windows that were open to the river’s evening breezes may have been used as bedrooms; others, with little baking ovens, were clearly kitchens, and there were also animal stalls and storage areas. Most were less than six feet

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