NARMOUTHIS AND TEBTUNIS

Mumkin day off, minfadluk?

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When I first heard that we were going to visit the Fayyum, I was stoked. I’m really interested in the Fayyum Portraits, and I wanted to see where they came from (plus, other material from the area is a complex mix between Greek and ancient Egyptian cultures). But after getting lost for two hours due to a road closing, we were all a little skeptical about driving further into the region. Narmouthis proved to be pretty interesting, but Tebtunis was certainly not worth the drive.

Narmouthis is the site of a temple to Renenoutet, the cobra goddess associated with the harvest (most likely because snakes kept mice and other animals from eating the grain). Lining the approach to the temple are alternating yellowy-limestone sphinxes and small step-pyramid-like structures. The walkway looks like that of an area I saw last summer in Cyprus.

Walking into the temple, it’s apparent that the level of preservation in the area is incredibly high. All of the stone work we saw was original, including the bottom courses of several pylons. I really couldn’t tell that these were gates, since all that remains of them are their sides; it appears that the top half of the city was wiped out by erosion and moving sand, though the bottom layers are in near-perfect condition. On the left side of one of the pylons was a stone lion with a cartoonish face, a comical addition to the otherwise barren structure. The statue of a man’s body, dressed in Greek-style clothing, stands on the left side of the next pylon. The occasional low relief, probably left over from the Middle Kingdom core of the original structure here, adorned stones here and there. The mudbrick walls are in great condition, too.

The masonry showed clear signs of having been done the same way as in the Late Period, where the borders of the stones were dressed before the architecture was created, and the reliefs added afterwards. At Narmouthis, the centers of these stones are raised without reliefs, except for a strange imitation cartouche and glyph sequence on the opposite face of one of the walls (added during the Roman Period). In a corner created by a pylon and a wall, bits of a floor mosaic were visible. The floor could have been covered in mosaic tiles, but the huge stone floor blocks found everywhere else would probably not have held these tiles too well. At one location, columns are constructed to fit into the crevices in a large wall.

Inside the sanctuary, I was able to deduce a couple things about Middle Kingdom temples (we haven’t seen any yet):

• The sanctuaries during this period were very small with a short approach to the shrines, because there was less emphasis on procession and the performance of rituals for the purpose of mystifying the temple activities–the whole thing was very personal.
• The cornice seems to have moved from the tops of shrines during the Middle Kingdom to the tops of pylons in later periods.

A small chamber with papyrus columns and a partial staircase to the roof serves as an anteroom. The Renenoutet shrine in the center of the sanctuary is accompanied by two others, to Sobek and Horus, on its sides. Strange tidbit: the bottom of the Renenoutet statue remains, showing her feet–but judging by the size of the statue and the height of the ceiling above the shrines, it would have been impossible for the cult statue to fit in the space where its remains currently stand. So why is the ceiling so low?

The temenos wall at Narmouthis does not stand, and it seems like it had nowhere to go: immediately to the left of the temple is a row of presumably domestic structures, made of grey mudbrick and filled with sand. Next to the yellow limestone blocks, the whole place looks like one huge sepia photograph.

As we explored the scattered remnants of a colonnade hall behind the temple, Nick found two pot sherds with blackened resin traces inside. Intricately-carved capitals have been placed on either side of a row of lintels outside the temple structure.

On the way back towards the front end of the temple, I noticed a large mudbrick structure with barrel-vaulted ceilings. If this was a storage area as William suggests (possibly a grannery because of the cobra association), then its close association with the temple points to a form of redistributional control over the people on the part of the priests.

A Ptolemaic structure nearby houses a double shrine, probably used for the storage of crocodile mummies.

One of the last sections of the site we visited today was a mudbrick temple structure, where the upper course of bricks has been added by conservators to preserve the courses below. But in the “priest’s house” next door, beautifully painted plaster peels off the walls with no help from restorers. These people need to get their priorities straight: the original wood and plaster are going to waste away into nothing!

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Tebtunis, as I mentioned earlier, wasn’t much of a thrill. I think that the main reason for my not being enchanted by the site was its restoration job: everything was rebuilt using new materials, and in such a way that none of the architecture could be explained, save what appears to be a bath house. The reconstruction work is quite tacky. There isn’t even a plaque explaining the nature of the site to visitors! I know the Fayyum is remote, but the team working at Tebtunis needs to do a public service and make the drive from Cairo worthwhile.

(The whole site is outlined with a dotted-line border made of mudbricks, so I imagine that it looks like a huge coupon from above.)

The baked-brick bath house was the most interesting part of the site for me, because it reminded me of the hammam at the Dragoman Mansion. In fact, as I explained to Leigh that this bath seems only to have a tepidarium and caldarium, and no room for cold air, William noted that Turkish baths have this third type of room.

Did you know that the baked bricks used to build the bath house are the same size as those used to build apartment buildings in New York? Weird…

We walked on the tops of walls in a (probably, but who knows) domestic area, and noticed that the restorers didn’t include any doors! There was also a strange stone structure between this are and the bath that looked a little like Stonehenge covered in plaster. The roof was unevenly constructed, and there was no staircase down. William speculated that it was a cistern, but its shape doesn’t seem to have a purpose if that’s so.

Over all, I was thoroughly unimpressed by the reconstruction at Tebtunis. I really would have loved to have seen the city as-was.