House of Ranefer 2002

Barry Kemp
At the beginning of March 2002 two groups of workmen, to a total of ten, began the reclearance under the direction of Paul Buckland and Eva Panagiotakopulu. It was quickly established that, although there had indeed been disturbance to the brick floors of the final phase and that all column bases and thresholds had been dug up, Peet's exploratory pits and the buried under-floor debris were largely intact. On the site of the well, the upper edge had weathered and collapsed to give a funnel-like appearance, taking one side of the flight of steps with it, and the water table had also risen. Nonetheless, the lower part of the staircase and the brick revetment to the well basin have survived to a substantial extent. In the two weeks allotted to the task most of the rooms of Ranefer's actual house were cleared of loose debris that had accumulated since 1921, and in doing this the deeper excavations of Peet's season were also cleaned. In the grounds of the house, little more was done beyond cleaning the upper part of the well. Work ceased for the season on March 14th. The buried strata, sealed by Ranefer's floors, do indeed contain plant and insect remains, and more survives of the earlier house than is indicated on the plan of 1921. These results justify continuing the project into future seasons, especially by exploring the lateral extent of the lower levels outside the fairly restricted limits of the 1921 season.

House of Ranefer: the house and granary court are at the bottom; the view is along the ‘street’ of houses excavated in 1921. Facing south-east. EES slide 02-3/2.

House of Ranefer and adjacent houses along the ‘street’. Left side of the frame is north-east. EES slide 02-12/6.

House of Ranefer and adjacent area. South-east is towards the top. EES slide 02-12/8.

The stratigraphic record made by Peet and Hayter is substantially correct. Where it can be improved on is in a better understanding of how the various strata came to be laid down and hence how the site changed its character over the years that Amarna was occupied. The provisional picture, which remains to be modified and amplified as the investigation is pursued in future seasons, is as follows:

Initially a broad pit was dug into the desert subsoil which is here an orangy gravel. There is nothing to say why this was done. Since the site lies beside one of the main north-south thoroughfares which might mark the edge of a stage in the lateral growth of the city, it is possible that gravel was dug to make bricks for new houses as they were laid out to the east. The pit then filled up, mainly with layers of earth which turned into hard-packed irregular surfaces. Peet's two exposures, in the central room and the transverse hall of what became Ranefer's house, represent respectively a northern and a southern cut into the pit fills. For the most part, the southern cut exposed walls and floors from earlier rooms built to smaller dimensions, evidently belonging to a smaller house. More of this building must lie hidden beneath the later floors or within the dust and rubble which, in some rooms, is all that remains. A small area of additional walls has already appeared lower down in the fill of the 'West Loggia', and we have established that a number of small features recorded on the 1921 plan of a room which leads off eastwards from the central hall also, in fact, belong to the earlier phase. In some places it can be seen that the floor of the rebuilt house also lies on a layer of rubble which includes pieces of white plaster spread over straw-rich mud plaster, either from the walls or ceiling (or both) of the earlier building, which must have been demolished.

In moving from Peet's southern to northern pit one evidently moves from inside the earlier house into an open space that lay beside it. Thus the northern wall of the earlier building must be still concealed beneath the brick paving of Ranefer's transverse hall. The adjacent open space must have been a yard, initially with a slightly concave surface. Several irregular mud 'floors' built up until the level of the yard was roughly equivalent to that of the adjacent building. Within Peet's original cut there are traces of an ancient circular cut filled with mud and sherds. One possibility is that this is the remains of a tree pit. Over the final mud surface there then developed a midden, now a rich dark earth containing charred and uncharred plant material and insect remains (including those of house flies and of a well preserved locust). Perhaps this was contemporary with the earlier building. When this was demolished some of the rubble, still with flakes of whitewashed plaster, spread over it. Ranefer's builder dealt with the midden by spreading a layer of clean desert sand and gravel over it, then covering this in turn with more rubble, and finally laying the floor of the new transverse hall over the top. Where the columns were to go, however, he guarded against subsidence by digging foundation pits and filling them with square brick supports.

So far the evidence points to Ranefer's house having been built to a separate plan over the demolished remains of an earlier building, probably a smaller house. The north wall of the later house does not, however, fit this simple scheme. In the southern part of the house the later walls have been built in foundation trenches which cut into everything that lies beneath. Much of the stratigraphic sequence of the northern cut, however, including the midden and covering of orange gravel, lies against the northern wall, which descends much deeper and was built into a trench cut only into one of the lowest mud 'floors'. Moreover, the surface of the wall, even where the midden lay against it, was mud plastered. At present the evidence points to this wall having originally served a different purpose, perhaps as the outer wall of a building which lay to the north of which only this wall was retained for re-use in Ranefer's new house. The depth of deposits at this point takes one well below the level of the ground of Ranefer's compound on the north. Presumably the deep stratigraphy which fills the old pit continues on the far side and remains to be investigated. It is to be hoped that this will shed further light on the history of the building.

Peet's examination of Ranefer's compound also revealed two phases of use, but whether they correspond to the two phases of the house site itself cannot as yet be discerned. No certain trace of the earlier phase or phases has been identified to the east, where the compound met the house, and it is clear that the pit which lies beneath the house did not extend this far in this direction. The first phase to the east had seen the digging of the well which Peet cleared of debris, and the construction of two circular grain silos on the north. For the second phase the well was completely filled and a columned room built over the top. The silos were also cut down to ground level and some storerooms built over the foundations, whilst the silos themselves were replaced by a larger number (four instead of two) close to the site of the original well. Ranefer's compound possessed a second well, in the north-east corner, but little more is known of it since it seems never to have been examined in detail.

House of Ranefer after cleaning, March 2002. South is towards the top. EES slide 02-2/37.

House of Ranefer after cleaning, March 2002. Note the loss of stone column bases and door thresholds since 1921. South-west is towards the top. EES slide 02-2/28.

House of Ranefer: general view after cleaning, with granary court in the foreground. Compare the view with the 1921 picture 21/59. Since 1921 the stonework has gone, but the brickwork has survived fairly well.

House of Ranefer: the 1921 stratification pit in the front hall. The line of bricks on edge at the top of the picture mark the position of the now missing limestone threshold. Facing south-west. EES slide 02-2/30.

House of Ranefer: side of the 1921 stratification pit in the outer hall. Compare with the 1921 photograph 21/64 taken in the direction of the wall on the right. Facing north-west. EES slide 02-2/12.

House of Ranefer: central hall. The floors and low walls belong to the earlier house. The round sandy patch is the second 1921 stratification pit. Facing south-west. EES slide 02-2/31.

House of Ranefer: eastern niche in the outer hall, south wall. Note the patch of red-painted mud plaster remaining on the side panel. Facing south-west. EES slide 02-3/8.

House of Ranefer: the earlier well in the granary court. Loose sand has been removed. The column base lies where it had fallen after 1921. The lower part of the well, filled with damp sand, is yet to be cleared out. Compare with the old picture 21/73. Facing north-east. EES slide 02-3/21.

House of Ranefer: the earlier well in the granary court. Samples of the soil filling the well shaft are being obtained from the use of a narrow steel auger. Facing north. EES slide 02-2/2.

House of Ranfer: sampling the soil which fills the well shaft. The damp gravely sand is being scooped from the hollow sampler fitted to the bottom of the auger. Facing north-west. EES slide 02-2/11.

The environmental evidence

Eva Panagiotakopulu and Paul Buckland
The sections exposed in Peet’s cut through the floor of the transverse hall had weathered considerably since his excavations, and there had been further disturbance by treasure hunters and feral dogs. Cleaning back of the sections, however, revealed substantial in situ deposits with much evident macroplant and animal debris, including large amounts of cereal chaff and numerous insect fragments. Preliminary disaggregation of samples of a 300 um sieve, and careful examination of the exposed face yielded large numbers of the puparia of the common housefly, Musca domestica L. This now cosmopolitan, strongly synanthropic pest breeds in accumulations of rotting plant and animal debris, including excrement, and it is frequent in Egypt at the present day. Skidmore (1985), in his monograph on the dipterous family Muscidae, has argued that M. domestica has its origins in the warmer parts of the Palaearctic termperate zone, and the species is probably native to Egypt, whence it has travelled with people to the rest of the world. Housefly puparia appear in the samples from the Workmen’s Village at Amarna (Skidmore in Panagiotakopulu 1999), and were also recorded during the Manchester Mummy Project (Curry 1979), but their abundance in the midden beneath Ranefer’s house imply an ideal pabulum, and it may be significant that Skidmore notes that fresh horse dung seems to be the preferred habitat. This may correlate with the chaff remains, which could derive from cereal waste fed to horses. The one beetle recovered from the preliminary evaluation, the large tenebrionid Trachyderma (?) hispada (Forsk.) is recorded as a scavenger in mills, granaries and open shounas (Attia and Kamel 1965), although it is not infrequent in other synanthropic situations, including around the expedition house at the present day. Swarms of houseflies pose a significant health risk, spreading, amongst many other diseases, typhoid, dysentery, diarrhoea and the blinding eye disease Trachoma. In the late nineteenth century Amelia Edwards (1993, 86) commented on the high frequency of blindness in Minya, and treatments for eye infections figure prominently in  medical papyri from the pharaonic to Roman periods (see Boon 1983).

Panagiotakopulu has previously recorded fragments of Orthoptera in samples from the Roman quarry site at Mons Claudianus in the Eastern Desert (Panagiotakopulu and van der Veen 1997), and large numbers of fragments from the Byzantine monastic site at Kom el-Nana must reflect their consumption by either man or other entomophage, but the largely complete example from the midden beneath Ranefer’s house allows identification to the species level using the keys by Bei-Bienko (1963). The specimen belongs to the solitary phase of the desert locust, Schistocerca gregaria L. Locusts are, of course, one of the Biblical plagues of Egypt, and high density, depletion offood resources and suitable weather conditions may lead to the mass emergence of the gregarious form (Uvarov 1966), leading to the widespread destruction of both crops and natural vegetation across a broad band of Africa, occasionally extending across the Mediterranean into Europe. Whilst the finding of a single individual may represent its accidental incorporation into the deposits, Greek sources refer to the insects being used as food (see Beavis 1988; Panagiotakopulu 2000). Largely consumed by the poor or by soldiers on campaign, they were also fed to caged birds. Around the Mediterranean, locusts were a well known food. In Cyrene, they were a popular dish, and Pliny (HN VII, 104) reports that an African tribe literally followed the locust swards. Herodotus (IV, 172) names a Libyan tribe, the Nassomones, who put sun-dried and ground locusts into their milk, and Pliny (HN VI, 195) also refers to an Ethiopian tribe known as Akridophagoi because their diet consisted largely of akrides (= locust, grasshoppers).

Fragments of other insects were evident in the cleaned sections of Peet’s pit beneath the transverse hall of Ranefer’s house, and further work will concentrate on the dry sieving and sorting of these closely stratified deposits. They promise to yield a detailed picture of living conditions and levels of hygiene in New Kingdom Amarna.

Sources cited

Attia, R. and A. H. Kamel, 1965. ‘The fauna of stored products in U.A.R.’, Bulletin Société Entomologique d’Égypte 49, 221-32.

Beavis, I. C., 1988. Insects and other Invertebrates in Classical Antiquity, Exeter.

Bei-Bienko, M., 1963. Locusts and Grass-hoppers of the USSR and Adjacent Countries, I, Jerusalem.

Boon, G. C., 1983. ‘Potters, Oculists and Eye Troubles’, Britannia14, 1-12.

Curry, A., 1979. ‘The insects associated with the Manchester mummies’, in A. R. David (ed.), Manchester Museum Mummy Project, Manchester, 113-17.

Edward, A. B., 1888 (1993 reprint). A Thousand Miles up the Nile, London.

Panagiotakopulu, E. and M. van der Veen. 1997. ‘Synanthropic insect faunas from Mons Claudianus, a Roman quarry site in the Eastern Desert, Egypt’, in A. C. Ashworth, P. C. Buckland and J. P. Sadler (eds), Studies in Quaternary Entomology – An Inordinate Fondness for Insects. Quaternary Proceedings 5, 199-206.

Panagiotakopulu, E., 2000. Archaeology and Entomology in the Eastern Mediterranean. Research into the History of Insect Synanthropy in Greece and Egypt, BAR International Series 836, Oxford.

Skidmore, P., 1985. The Biology of the Muscidae of the World, Dordrecht.

Skidmore, P., 1999. in E. Panagiotakopulu, ‘An examination of biological materials from coprolites from XVIII Dynasty Amarna, Egypt’, Journal of Archaeological Science 26, 547-51.

Uvarov, B., 1966. Grasshoppers and Locusts, London.