Plain Talk

By Mursi Saad El-Din

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There seem to be more Egyptologists than experts on any other civilisation. Dr Gwendolyn Leick is one, but her interest seems to lie in architecture, or what she calls vernacular architecture. Yet it goes a little further, touching on the influence of ancient architecture on modern Egyptian architecture, and in a paper entitled "Egyptian Vernacular Architecture: Ancient and Modern", she says that the Pyramids of Gizah are among the most impressive architectural complexes in the world. Yet their geometric shape has so pure and abstract a quality as to virtually obscure their practical purpose. So, for thousands of years people have speculated on the purpose of the Pyramids and produced a flood of more or less fantastical interpretations. Apart from any esoteric functions they may have had, however, the Pyramids with their immense and tightly controlled mass of stone are surely the most successful realisation of monumentality. They startlingly convey the double meaning of the phrase 'keeping the memory alive'; and do so in the grandest manner. Because of their belief in an afterlife, ancient Egyptians were so obsessed with the concept of the monumental that when necessity forced later kings to hide their burial places in inaccessible mountain valleys, they had huge mortuary temples built to perpetuate their memory and compensate for lack of visibility.

Leick goes on to say that temples and tombs are all that is left of ancient Egypt's architectural output. Solidly built of granite or limestone, they have more or less withstood the passing of millennia; the settlements and habitations of the living, however -- the towns, villages, farms and palaces -- have all but disappeared completely. Built mainly of sun-dried mud bricks, they have crumbled back into the landscape, often sprinkled on the soil as fertiliser by the peasants. Houses -- even those of kings -- were not meant to last more than the lifespan of their builders. Built to serve the needs of the living, they were practical in purpose and impermanent. They were the very opposite of the monumental, which was a privilege exclusive to gods and the great dead. Only their houses were built of stone, so plentiful in Egypt. It is entirely in keeping with the ancient Egyptian outlook on life and death that they expressed the difference between mortal and immortal even in the choice of building materials: ephemeral for the one, enduring for the other.

Because of the distinction we now know very little of the ancient domestic architecture. Traditionally, Egyptian archaeology has concentrated on monumental architecture. Big temples, city walls or palaces have strong foundations and are naturally the most conspicuous remains. But nowadays excavations are expected to yield much more valid information, including information of a sociological and anthropological nature, and the ordinary house, even the poorer quarters of ancient cities, can be detected with the refined methods of the modern archaeologist. One of the pioneers of this approach, says Dr Leick, was Sir Leonard Woolley, whose lively broadcasts on the town of Ur in southern Mesopotamia have gravely furthered popular interest in archaeology.

Woolley was also among the many distinguished excavators at Amarna in the Nile Delta. This famous site, dating to the 14th century BC, was the residence of the heretic King Amenophis I, also called Akhenaten; it is the key site in Egypt for domestic architecture. The city was laid out on virgin territory, vast temples and palaces, administrative buildings, barracks and quays were erected with great speed. Courtiers and officials built their villas on a generous scale, unimpeded by the urban constraints of the old capital, Thebes. But soon after Akhenaten's death the city was abandoned: cursed by his successors, it was never inhabited again.