Excavations of Saqqara (1908-9, 1909-10): the Monastery of Apa Jeremias
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CORNELL UNIVERSITY LIBRARY Cornell University Library DT 73.S3Q6 1908-10 Excavations of Saqgara M90M. 19^^^^^^ ill 3 1924 028 67 273 ... \<^y Cornell University Library The original of this book is in the Cornell University Library. There are no known copyright restrictions in the United States on the use of the text. http://www.archive.org/details/cu31924028671273 EXCAVATIONS AT SAQQARA (1908-9, 1909-10) SERVICE DES ANTIQUITES DE L'EGYPTE EXCAVATIONS AT SAQQARA (1908-9, 1909-10) THE MONASTERY OF APA JEREMIAS BY J. E. QUIBELL THE COPTIC INSCRIPTIONS EDITED BY SIR HERBERT THOMPSON, bart. LE CAIRE DE L'INSTITUT FRANCAIS IMPRIMERIE * D'ARCHl&OLOGIE ORIENTALE 1912 INTRODUCTION. Within certain wide limits the age of all the Coptic remains in the monastery of Apa Jeremias is clear : the community must have existed from about the end of the v^*" cen- tury to the middle of the ix*''. The coins begin with Anastasius and end with the first of the Abbasids; the dated stelae and Arab glass stamps fall almost entirely within the vni*'' century; one stela only is as late as 84/i A. D., one glass stamp perhaps of 856. The beginning is fixed by the tale in John of Nikiou of the founder's connection with Anastasius (v. Intr. Saqq. , III) and by the close similarity of the earlier sculpture to that of Justinian's churches at Ravenna; the end must have been before 960 A. D. when a Muslim scored a memento of his visit on a pillar in the ruins. That within this range of three and a half centuries from about 5ooto85oA. D. the monastery had an eventful history is clear even from the poor remains of its public buildings. There was at least one destruction and rebuilding of the main church; two of the three other churches were built, in part, with material derived from earlier ones; then doorways and passages were blocked, walls were doubled in thickness, a boundary wall was added. In the later days it is plain that the monks felt the need of defence and that the paths through the monastery were made as tortuous and forbidding as might be. It is desirable to attempt some separation of the monuments into earlier and later groups and to determine how much construction was carried out after the first found- ation and at what period it took place. The problem is best seen in the main church. Here two apses were found, one with solid foundations of stone , the other at a higher level and built on a substructure of mud brick; the floor of the second church was complete and it was only at the east end where the earlier fabric projected below it that anything of the lower levels could be seen. Above the floor a great number of capitals of very varied types were found, two of an elaborate Corinthian form, some of a simple basin-hke shape but with a bold vine-leaf pattern in relief, others of the melon type with eight-lobed section, still others with large acanthus-leaf decoration. Some of the bases were of marble and well carved, but most of limestone and of ruder execution; a few shafts were of marble , II INTRODUCTIOIN. and two of granite but most again of limestone, either plastered and painted or painted direct on the stone. An obvious explanation of part of the variety in ornament was that all the marble and the better capitals had been saved from the earher church. It appears at first strange that they should be preserved in such good condition, as, if the church had been destroyed so far as to need rebuilding, the capitals would have suffered with it. But to this we may reply that some of them indeed may so have perished, and that we see only those that suffered least; also that parallel cases are not far to seek; in Aquileia , for example, most of the capitals appear to date from the iv*'' century though the church was certainly rebuilt in the XI*^ Capitals are a httle beyond the reach of the hasty vandal and if they escape calcination from the burning of the roof may survive a very wide -spread devastation. Close to the church there were indubitable signs of very serious destruction; a wall to the west of it had been strengthened and more than doubled in thickness by the addition of a second wall or buttress , and in this a great number of blocks , decorated in the best style known on the site, had been reused as building material, the orna- mented faces being generally hidden from view (pi. XXXIX). Many of them were from a frieze which may, as an example at Bawit shows, have been outside the church. They certainly come from some ambitious building and were reused at a time when it was needful to make the paths near the church easily defensible and the church itself externally inconspicuous. Some of them had been mutilated before being moved from their original position, human and animal figures having been chiselled out; otherwise they were in rather good condition as if they had been taken down with care ; it may well be that they are derived from an external frieze in the first church and that this ornament was suppressed in the second. When did this destruction of the first church take place? The readiest answer would be that it happened in about 780 A. D. when, as we can hardly doubt from the evi- dence of the coinage, some serious blow did fall on the monastery; but there is a little evidence of earlier troubles and that it was during these that the church was ruined. 1 . Below two of the cells two small hoards of gold were found , of five and four coins respectively, all of the last Byzantine emperors who held Egypt — Phocas , Heraclius Constantinus II. As there were two hoards of the same date it seems likely that they . INTRODUCTION. Ill were lost at some time of disturbance and that this was before the Arab gold coins has begun to oust the Byzantine from circulation, probably therefore before 760 A. D. as the Arabs began to coin about 690 A. D. This is, of course, but a slight argument and, even if correct, would indicate only an attack on the monastery, not necessarily the destruction of the church. 2 Despite all the variety there is a certain uniform goodness of style in the capitals of the church. Had the rebuilding been so late as the second half of the vni**' century we should expect that some of the decoration would betray more markedly its later date and the poverty and adversity in which its builders lived. Against this it may be urged that one vineleaf capital at least (Saqq. , III, pi. XIX) has every appearance of being a poor imitation of a fine model, that, as the second church was smaller than, the first and was probably less ornate , more than enough decorated stones may have been left from the earlier fabric, so that the restorers had no need to leave us examples of their skill in carving; further that part of the second church, viz. the foundation of the apse , is precisely of that shabby and unsound construction that we should look for in a time of distress , and lasdy that the limestone bases are very different in style from those in marble. All this is true but slill the church remains a suprising effort for a community so impoverished as we must suppose this to have been after the middle of the viH* century. 3. In the mandara south of the church some of the stones in the pavement bore inscriptions; one of them had not been brought in from the cemetery but had been engraved after it was laid down, for the text was much crowded at the end to fit the hmited space while on gravestones a large blank is left below the inscription (Saqq., Ill, pi. XLIV, 1). Another slab (same plate, 2) bears one half of an inscription the other half of which must have been on a similar stone which has disappeared; it is dated to 751-2 A. D. Probably this stone, like the other, was inscribed as it lay. On digging below it recently we found two Coptic burials in wooden coffins with gable lids over the heads ; one of them must almost certainly be that of the brother comme- morated above. Now the pavement of the mandara is continuous with that of the second church and markedly higher than that of the first; below it is another pavement, broken through when the coffins mentioned above were buried. The distance between the two (80 cent.) IV INTRODUCTION. is about the same as that between the floors of the two churches. Therefore the pave- ment had been raised and the second church already built by 76 1 A. D. ; the destruc- tion of the first church must have been some years earlier and the mutilation of the sculptures earlier still. It would in some ways be easier to suppose that the animal figures were broken out, say, in 722 when Obeydallah b. Habhab is recorded to have destroyed the Coptic pictures, that the great destruction took place in 760 and that the rebuilding on a smaller scale and the construction of the buttress-wall were as late as the time of Musa b. Isa (ca. 791). But on this view it is almost impossible to account for the dated slab in the mandara and equally difiicult to explain the absence of coins of later date than 760 A.