Schlagwortarchiv: Amarna

Now available in open access: An Egyptian villa with animal pens in New Kingdom Nubia

Veröffentlicht am von
Antworten

We are very pleased to share that our article “An Egyptian Villa with Animal Pens in New Kingdom Nubia: Reinterpreting Building H4 and Area H4W on Sai Island”, published last year in the Journal of Urban Archaeology, is now available in open access. The study presents a new interpretation of part of the residential quarter of Sai City and explores how recent advances in digital reconstruction can contribute directly to archaeological research.

Sai City was a walled Egyptian temple town on Sai Island in modern Sudan. Our article revisits Building H4 and adjoining Area H4W, a mid-Eighteenth Dynasty residential complex excavated in the 1970s and reconstructed by Ingrid Adenstedt in 2016 as part of the ERC AcrossBorders project.

The reinvestigation began with Robert Kalasek’s terrestrial laser scan. Re-examining the data revealed curved structures beneath a later building in H4W, while sections generated from the scan placed them at approximately the same level as the original surrounding walls. Their dimensions, construction and position within rectangular enclosures argue against an interpretation as silos or ovens and closely parallel animal pens, most likely pigsties, excavated at Amarna. The wall thicknesses and shared-yard arrangement are comparable, while faunal remains elsewhere at Sai indicate that pigs were bred locally. We therefore suggest that H4W contained a small-scale pig-keeping area with at least two pens and a shared yard.

Re-examination of the scan also revealed a bed niche in Room H4/3 and an L-shaped internal wall characteristic of contemporary stairwells in H4/1N. These features allow H4 to be reconstructed as a typical Egyptian villa with a tripartite plan: private rooms at the rear, a main hall and stairwell in the centre, and an entrance section at the front. A preserved threshold at the southern end of the narrow passage between H4 and H4W further indicates that what had previously been understood as a public street was instead a private alleyway. H4 and H4W thus formed a single enclosed estate comprising an elite residence and its associated infrastructure.

Digital reconstruction played an important role in reaching these conclusions. Recent advances in real-time rendering allow highly detailed scans of architectural remains, objects and landscapes to be used at their correct scale without first reducing them to heavily simplified geometries. Using Unreal Engine 5, we created a photorealistic, on-the-ground reconstruction around the original scan data. Hypothetical walls, roofs and other architectural features were reconstructed directly around the surviving remains and explored interactively at human scale.

Unreal Engine’s photorealism allows materials, spatial relationships and environmental conditions to be investigated with sufficient specificity for the reconstruction to function as a research environment. Individual construction layers can be added or removed, alternative solutions can be compared, and the reasoning behind particular choices can be made interactively transparent. Navigating the reconstruction at human scale also makes features such as narrow passages, restricted access and the confined nature of Sai’s urban planning immediately tangible.

The geopositioned model additionally reproduces the changing position of the sun at Sai according to the time of day and season. This proved particularly important when considering how the proposed pig pens were roofed. Pigs are highly susceptible to heat stress, making adequate shade essential. We tested an elevated grass-and-pole roof that would have allowed a person to pass beneath it for maintenance. During the hottest months, however, this solution would have left the interiors of both pens exposed to direct sunlight for several hours at critical times of day. The more plausible reconstruction is therefore a light, removable roof placed directly on top of the low pen walls. This accords with the archaeological evidence from Amarna and would have kept the animals shaded while still allowing the roof to be removed for cleaning and maintenance.

This example illustrates the wider potential of real-time digital reconstruction. The model is not merely a final illustration of conclusions reached by other means. It brings together scan data, excavation records, architectural parallels and environmental conditions in an interactive space in which the physical consequences of different hypotheses can be tested. In this case, the process helped us recognize previously overlooked features, reconsider the organization of an entire estate and investigate a practical aspect of animal husbandry that would otherwise have remained difficult to assess.

The close parallels between the H4 estate and houses at Amarna are also significant for our understanding of Egyptian domestic architecture. Amarna is still frequently treated as an exceptional city, yet its villas adhered to traditions found elsewhere in Egypt and, as the evidence from Sai now shows, beyond Egypt’s borders. The villa and its associated animal pens represent a distinctly Egyptian form of domestic and social organization adapted to the confined setting of a Nubian temple town: another manifestation of “Egypt in microcosm” in New Kingdom Nubia.

The publication is available here:

Carl G. Elkins, Julia Budka & Chloë Ward, “An Egyptian Villa with Animal Pens in New Kingdom Nubia: Reinterpreting Building H4 and Area H4W on Sai Island”, Journal of Urban Archaeology 12, 2025, 33–51, https://doi.org/10.1484/J.JUA.5.151426.

Cemeteries between Attab and Ferka: What to expect from them?

Veröffentlicht am von
Antworten

Before we’re able to go to the field, a lot of work on the cemeteries in our concession area is currently underway from Munich. Marion’s recent blog posts already discussed the potential of magnetometry for us to better understand what we are dealing with, and this is especially true in connection with Cajetan’s remote sensing work. Cajetan’s work has been revealing some interesting aspects of our sites and hopefully you’ll be able to catch glimpses of his work soon in here.

This work provides important background regarding the specificities of our sites. Alongside an assessment of the cemeteries and comparison with other sites across Nubia, this allows us to put together an ‚ideal type‘ (sensu Max Weber) that can guide us through future survey and excavation. The data sets produced by Vila, as well as previous MUAFS seasons, are also crucial for us to establish this ideal type, which works as a methodological tool to confirm our hypotheses (or not).

In my previous posts, I’ve already shared details about the assessment of sites I’ve been carrying out over the past months. Base on Vila’s data, we can know what to expect from the cemeteries in terms of preservation, types of structures etc. For example, the Late New Kingdom „tomb of Isis“ works an example of „elite“ or „sub-elite“ burial ground in the periphery of temple towns, where Egyptian and Nubian features mixed, probably to a greater extent than at temple towns—an example of hypothesis that we can create departing from an ideal type. This mixture occurred, for instance, in the combination of Egyptian substructures and a tumuli superstructure, remains of which were located in previous MUAFS seasons (see my previous posts). Departing from an ideal type such as the „tomb of Isis“ we can approach how the ideal varies across geographical and social spaces within our concession area.

For example, Marion and Cajetan’s work are shedding light on the extension of cemeteries where we can easily see from above those tumuli, some of which already explored by Vila, but also other features. It is difficult to determine from a distance what is the nature of this evidence. Comparative research then comes in handy. I’ve already proposed a discussion on the whereabouts of the majority of the Nubian population during the New Kingdom (a discussion that also applies to the Kerma period).

Figure 1: tomb types at Fadrus, adapted from Spence 2019, based on Säve-Söderbergh and Troy 1991.

Other Nubian cemeteries such as Fadrus in Lower Nubia add information about non-elite groups to our ideal type (figure 1). If larger tumuli such as the „tomb of Isis“ are easily located based on drone and satellite imagery, simple non-elite pit graves originally with no extensive superstructures pose more challenges. Though, comparisons allow us to open up to possibilities that include, in our research framework, social groups not clearly represented by evidence accumulated from large temple-town cemeteries. These groups—which comprised the bulk of Nubian populations working in the fields, mines, and probably carrying out other work in the service of larger centres—are yet to be fully understood (and here work at the cemeteries of Amarna provide us interesting comparison points, see Stevens 2018).

Several are the challenges of doing research from the office, as we cannot yet go to the field. But work conducted so far, from various fronts, help us establish a pretty solid starting point from which to explore our sites knowing more or less what to expect. This takes into account old and new evidence, extensive comparisons with other sites and a clear theoretical framework, which is essential to formulate research questions and carry out large scale projects such as DiverseNile.

References

Säve-Söderbergh and Troy 1991. New Kingdom pharaonic sites: the finds and the sites.

Spence 2019. New Kingdom burials in Lower and Upper Nubia. In Handbook of Ancient Nubia, ed. D. Raue.

Stevens 2018. Death and the city: The cemeteries of Amarna in their urban context. Cambridge Archaeological Journal 28 (1): 103–126. doi:10.1017/S0959774317000592