ar-ramal

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Ar-Ramal ( DMG ar-Ramāl ) was a settlement during the Meroitic and early Christian times on the Nile in what is now southern Egypt . The ruins of a cemetery church and a monastery church were examined before the place was completely submerged in the rising Lake Nasser in 1964/65 .

location

Ar-Ramal was on the left, western bank of the Nile between the 1st and 2nd cataracts, a few kilometers northeast of the early Christian settlement of Tamit , about 80 kilometers from the Sudanese border town of Wadi Halfa and halfway between the ancient cities of Qustul and Qasr Ibrim . The small church of Kaw stood south across the east bank of the river .

Research history

The necropolis of ar-Ramal was visited by Hermann Junker in 1911 during an expedition of the Vienna Academy of Sciences to nearby Ermenne and other Nubian places with Coptic cemeteries. His report was published in 1925. In 1933, Ugo Monneret de Villard carried out excavations on behalf of the Egyptian Antiquities Authority and with the support of the Italian Foreign Ministry. In doing so, he completely exposed the cemetery church. As part of the UNESCO rescue operation started in 1960 shortly before most of the ancient sites in Lower Nubia were flooded, William Yewdale Adams investigated the site. In February 1964, Friedrich Wilhelm Deichmann , Erich Dinkler , Peter Grossman and other members of the German Archaeological Institute found most of the buildings covered by sand during a short trip through Lower Nubia.

Cemetery church

The cemetery church, which has been rebuilt several times and has an unusual floor plan, was located in the middle of the necropolis on a flat southern slope. In the last stage of construction, the church consisted of four long rectangular rooms, two of which were adjacent central aisles , which were closed on the east and west by semicircular apses .

Only the southern central nave, the southern outer longitudinal wall and the adjacent part of the east wall belonged to the original building. The originally three-aisled, almost symmetrical building was likely to have been around nine meters wide; the length to the west could no longer be determined. Except for a low base zone, all the walls were made of mud bricks. Behind the semicircular apse, instead of the otherwise usual narrow corridor, an east transverse room was laid out across the entire width of the building, which was entered through doors on both sides of the apse. The strong separation of the three rooms from each other by almost closed walls instead of the central pillars is unusual. There were only three passageways between the central nave and side aisles. The eastern wall openings on the side of the apse led directly into the presbytery behind the low brick choir barriers (ḥiǧāb) . Remains of a bench and an ambo were found on the adjacent walls of the central parish room . Nothing remained of the exterior entrances from the first construction phase. Church rooms that are similarly divided are known from Karanug (west bank, downstream near Qasr Ibrim ), ʿAbd al-Qādir-Süd (south of Wadi Halfa) and from the south building of the double church in Tamit.

In the first phase of conversion into a double church, the north aisle got another round altar apse. The previous partition wall to the central nave was reinforced and partially rebuilt. Both rooms received an additional round apse on the west side. The next construction phase, recognizable by a vertical wall joint, was the addition of a side aisle in the north. Overall, a slightly slanted, square floor plan with a side length of about 13 meters was created. The eastern transverse area was bricked up in the area of ​​the northern extension. The three side rooms along the west wall, which are typical for Nubian churches, were missing after the renovation. The stairwell, which was replaced by an extension during the last structural change, half of which protruded from the southwest corner, was also gone. It contained a single flight of stairs to the roof that was only accessible from outside. Outside the northwest corner, a square lounge or living room was created. In contrast to the oldest church building, the walls of the conversions were made of flat sandstone chunks up to the vault, only the newly added northern east apse was made of adobe bricks. In general, clay bricks were more complex to manufacture and therefore more expensive than rubble stones. For reasons of economy or because of their minor importance, the western apse arches in the lower half were made of rubble stones.

The churches of Karanug and ʿAbd al-Qādir-Süd are dated to the 6th century according to ceramic finds. Peter Grossmann therefore estimates the original building at the end of the 6th or 7th century and the subsequent renovations in the 9th to 11th centuries. It is unclear why the cemetery church needed a second chancel in the east. The northern apse may have been used to worship a martyr or to keep the dead. There are no assumptions about the function of the two western apses.

There were no other double churches in Nubia, consisting of two adjacent central aisles. In Tamit , two separate churches connected on the longitudinal wall were created through a renovation, and in Gindinarri a side chapel was added to the northern longitudinal wall, so that a second chancel was created. The situation in Nubia was fundamentally different from that in Egypt, where the construction of new churches was forbidden from the 12th century and therefore additional apses for a new altar had to be created by converting the eastern side rooms.

Monastery church

The church building got its name because it was enclosed within a larger building complex and there was no direct connection to the street. The relatively high hill of ruins ( Kom ) was partially excavated by Ugo Monneret de Villard and has not been examined since. There may have been predecessor buildings not reached during the excavations in deeper layers. This is indicated by the height of the Kom and the stone block of the house with reliefs from the Meroitic period, which were built into the church walls as spolia . There was no other ancient settlement in the immediate vicinity from which the hewn stones could have been brought.

The main room of the three-aisled church was divided by two pillars , which were only preserved at a low height in the 1960s. In some areas the quarry stone walls of the outer walls were still room-high. On the photos made by Monneret de Villard in 1933, wall sections that are no longer present with almost horizontal horizontal joints made of carefully assembled house blocks can be seen. In the course of the 8th century, the tradition of stone-working in Nubia was lost, and the stones that were added in places afterwards mostly came from previous buildings. Therefore Peter Grossmann dates the domed church to the end of the 7th century. William Yewdale Adams does not give a date, but sorts it in his typology to the churches of the 9th – 13th centuries Century too.

The central church space was covered by a dome in the form of a Nubian vault with an inner diameter of 3.1 meters. The relatively large span of the vault is only exceeded in Nubia by the nave dome church of Tamit with 3.3 meters. The domes of the other Nubian churches had a diameter of less than 3 meters - apart from the special case of the church in Kulb .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Hermann Junker : Ermenne. Report on the excavations of the Academy of Sciences in Vienna in the cemeteries of Ermenne (Nubia), in the winter of 1911/12. Memorandum 67/1, Vienna 1925, p. 4
  2. ^ FW Deichmann, P. Grossmann: Nubische Forschungen. Berlin 1988, pp. 5, 25-28.
  3. ^ Peter Grossmann: Christian Architecture in Egypt (= Handbook of Oriental Studies. Section One: The Near and Middle East. Volume 62). Brill, Leiden et al. 2002, ISBN 90-04-12128-5 , pp. 95 f
  4. ↑ William Yewdale Adams: Architectural Evolution of the Nubian Church, 500-1400 AD In: Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, Vol. 4, 1965, pp. 87-139; P. 87 at JSTOR
  5. ^ FW Deichmann, P. Grossmann: Nubische Forschungen. Berlin 1988, pp. 100 f, 105, 108.
  6. ^ FW Deichmann, P. Grossmann: Nubische Forschungen. Berlin 1988, p. 157.