Ballas

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Ballas (also Deir el-Ballas ) is a place in southern Egypt on the western bank of the Nile , about 30 km north of Thebes .

discovery

In 1894 , the English Egyptologists Flinders Petrie and Quibell found an ancient burial site with around 900 graves from pre-dynastic times near Ballas .

At the end of the Second Intermediate Period and at the beginning of the New Kingdom , an important royal residence was located here. Parts of the city and two palace complexes could be excavated. These palaces stood on platforms. When George Andrew Reisner excavated them from 1900 to 1901, he considered the superstructures, which were the actual palaces, to be Coptic and removed them without further recording them.

The center of the city was apparently the North Palace, which took up an area of ​​approximately 45,000 m². Its exact extent has not yet been researched. The platform of the palace consisted of casemates, the walls of which were sometimes up to 5 m high during the excavations. There were remains of figural wall paintings. The south palace was approx. 100 m × 44 m in size. He too stood on a platform made of casemates. This platform was reached via a monumental staircase.

meaning

Ballas has been around since the time of the Naqada culture around 4000 BC because of the clay deposits there . Chr. Famous for the manufactured there ceramics , widely exported were. This made Ballas the word for "clay jug" in the Arabic language .

literature

  • Peter Lacovara: Deir el-Ballas. Preliminary Report on the Deir el-Ballas Expedition, 1980–1986 (= American Research Center in Egypt Reports 12). Published for the American Research Center in Egypt by Eisenbrauns, Winona Lake IN 1990, ISBN 0-936770-24-4 .
  • Peter Lacovara: Deir el-Ballas. In: Kathryn A. Bard (Ed.): Encyclopedia of the Archeology of Ancient Egypt. Routledge, London 1999, ISBN 0-415-18589-0 , pp. 244-46.

Coordinates: 26 ° 1 '  N , 32 ° 46'  E