Excavation in Egypt at Tell el-Balamun
The temple of Amun at Tell el-Balamun
The principal temple of the site was dedicated to the god Amun.
Excavation has revealed three stages of building interspersed with
periods of neglect and demolition.
Throughout the various stages the temple remained on the same
spot, with the consequence that the later structures cut into those
of earlier date. This process provided the essential features
necessary to discover the sequence of building through the detailed
observation of the way in which older ruins had been either buried
under later deposits of material or cut by new foundations.
The oldest temple of which we have evidence on the site dated
from the Nineteenth Dynasty (1295-1186 BC), but nothing remained in
place of the original stone building. Its position could be
determined only by the discovery of the associated wall of
sun-dried brick which had surrounded the temple. This wall, with a
thickness of over 11 metres, has been traced by excavation on
three sides of the temple and the location of its gateways
established. The only stone element to have survived from this
temple was the lower part of a colossal statue of King Ramesses II
with the god Amun and the goddess Mut, found re-used in the
construction of a much later gateway. An inscription on this statue
gives the early name of the city, Sma-Behdet.
More substantial remains were
recovered from the rebuilding of the temple in the period between
825 and 550 BC. Building seems to have commenced under king
Sheshonq III (825-773 BC), who constructed a large pylon gateway at
the front of his new temple.
Small objects placed under the foundation of this gate as part
of the ritual of establishing a new building - known as foundation
deposits - were found to be inscribed with the name of the king.
The royal name on the deposits appeared with that of the Fan
Bearer, Hor, one of the highest officials of the time.
The foundations of temples of this period were entirely filled
with clean sand, much of which remained in place, 
so by following the extent of
the sand it was possible to trace the ground-plan of the building,
despite the fact that all the above-ground masonry had been
quarried away in later periods.
The temple of Sheshonq III was enlarged by the kings of the
Twenty-Sixth Dynasty (664-525 BC) by the addition at the front of a
colonnaded approach and another huge pylon gate, seventy-five
metres wide, one of the largest known in Egypt. Of this, again,
only the sand foundation-bed remains and unfortunately in this case
no foundation deposits were preserved to identify the builder more
precisely.
It is probable that this stage was initiated by king Psamtik I
(664-610 BC) who is known to have been active at Tell el-Balamun,
building a small temple in the southern part of the site and a new
enclosure wall around the entire sacred area.
The stratigraphy of the
site indicates that the whole of the temple of Amun was completely
demolished sometime after the end of the Twenty-Sixth Dynasty in
525 BC. The former sacred site was then encroached upon by secular
activities, such as the construction of pottery kilns and the
cutting of rubbish-pits, and languished neglected until the temple
was rebuilt once more under king Nekhtnebef (380-362 BC).
The back of this new temple lay directly over the former
position of that built by Sheshonq III, but the discovery of a
foundation deposit of Nekhtnebef at the rear corner of the building
shows that the whole structure must have been rebuilt from
foundation level. At the front, the earlier arrangement of a
colonnaded approach and a great pylon was abandoned and instead
Nekhtnebef's temple had a simple rectangular courtyard within a
plain wall of limestone about two metres in thickness.
On the east side of this courtyard a raised terrace of mud-brick
was constructed as the base for some kind of chapel, and to the
west of the temple a separate sand-bed foundation, discovered in
1998, seems to have been intended for the Mammisi. A granite shrine
was placed in the sanctuary but never inscribed and fragments of it
are visible at the site today.
The temple-building programme of the Thirtieth Dynasty at
Balamun was so ambitious, including not just the reconstruction of
the main temple but also the addition of a subsidiary temple and
the building of the latest enclosure wall, that it is not
surprising that some elements were never completed. From the
evidence of rubbish-pits cut into the area of the temple forecourt,
it seems that the temple of Amun, at least, had ceased to function
by the end of the Ptolemaic Period.
Images (from top):
- Foundation deposit of Sheshonq III below
the second pylon
- Plaques and beads from one of the
deposits of Sheshonq III
- Sand bed for the Thirtieth Dynasty
forecourt wall
- Foundation deposit of Nectanebo I from
the back of the temple