Dr. Paul Nicholson, archaeologist from Cardiff University and a specialist in ancient Egyptian technology, had located a glass and glazing workshop first recorded by Petrie in 1892. Petrie's account, characteristically brief but stated with great authority, has continued to stand as a prime source of information. Dr. Nicholson carried out a second season of excavation on large furnaces found in the workshop. He collected not only kiln samples but also waste products with hopes of reconstructing the whole manufacturing process. All such material is property of the Egyptian government, but he had a special permit, with a very small window of time, to export small samples to Cardiff for analyses.
Final preparations for the publication of a study on the ancient textile industry at Amarna were also time sensitive. I needed more photographs for the nearly completed book. In the 1980's, excavations at the Workmen's Village brought to light around 5,000 fabric fragments. At that time Dr. Gillian Vogelsang-Eastwood, textile expert, cleaned and cataloged the pieces, which represent a unique sample of cloth in daily use by the ancient community.
Dr. Vogelsang-Eastwood's monograph formed the core of a wider study concerning evidence for textile manufacture at Amarna. Other evidence includes spindle-whorls and actual loom pieces. Rooms in two main-city houses were cleared on the basis of old reports. One of these rooms, if the fittings are correctly interpreted, would have looked remarkably like the weaving scene from the Theban tomb of Official Djehuty-nefer.
The New Kingdom saw the introduction of a vertical loom with more complicated construction, as opposed to older horizontal looms of the Middle Kingdom. A few pieces of such looms are in museum collections. Dr. Mohammed Saleh, of the Egyptian Museum in Cairo, arranged for Gwil Owen to photograph artifacts in open display cases. The evidence, including clues within the textiles themselves, led to Herbert Farbrother, loom-maker living outside Cambridge, recreating a small size loom according to my sketches and source materials. He incorporated his own solutions to the technical flaws he perceived. Minor modifications are currently being made. The vertical loom was easier to use, required less labor, provided the weaver with a more comfortable working position and incorporated devices that helped maintain the evenness of the weaving.
Gwil Owen, photographer for the University of Cambridge's archaeology museum, utilized the newer, properly equipped photography studio at the Expedition House, to process his close-up pictures of the textile detail. There are a number of patchwork pieces, including one with alternate red and white squares sewn together. Could these have been from an awning or tent? I tend to take the common view that the Egyptians were intensely conservative about everything and if their ancestors had done something a particular way then they would copy it exactly. However, the New Kingdom was a time of new ideas, as exemplified by Akhenaten, and maybe this clever loom was one of them.
The focus of an important part of our fieldwork since 1987, with the
assistance of architect Michael Mallinson, has been the Small Aten Temple,
a key building in the Central City. Originally cleared in 1931 by
John Pendlebury, it represents the first stage in a thorough re-examination
of the Central City and has provided an opportunity to develop an approach
toward conservation and better presentation of Amarna's buildings.
We opened a sequence of courtyards by removing Pendlebury's huge excavation dumps. Modest repairs have been done to the brickwork though there is much more left to be done. Akhenaten built in stone on a monumental scale, but his successors removed the stone and only patches of cement foundations are left. These preserve the outline but are too fragile to be left exposed.
The sanctuary is a shallow, sandy hole in the ground that lets visitors easily miss the point of the whole building. Our solution is to mark the outline of the principal walls in low walls of new stone blocks and fill the spaces between them with the original chippings and stone dust from Pendlebury's excavations. This creates a low platform at the original floor level of the sanctuary and the low stone walls will be visible, though not obtrusive, from the road for viewing the building's footprint. Michael Mallinson is supervising the wall-line layout, and several thousand blocks of original size have been ordered from a quarry near Minia. We know from fragments that the ancient corners were the standard Egyptian style with vertical, cylindrical moldings. The hard, shelly Minia limestone is difficult to cut neatly this way, but the modern local quarries at Amarna extract their finer, softer limestone only by blasting. The moldings will be cut by a sculptor in Cairo and, if all goes as planned, it should be possible to include these moldings in the new walls when work begins again in September.
Barry Kemp is Professor of Egyptology on the Faculty of Oriental Studies at the University of Cambridge in England. He has spent the past 18 years working on the excavation, conservation, research and publication of Akhenaten's capital city at Amarna. Currently under the sponsorship of the Egyptian Exploration Society, Mr. Kemp is the only Egyptologist doing physical work in this area.