EGYPTIAN
ARCHAEOLOGY
tower houses. Here the Late Period building has cut directly into the underlying level, with the magazine of the New Kingdom temple of Sutekh (Seth). The walls A/I of the magazine have been partly integrated into the foundation of the building, which A/II is divided into three chambers. The external form is rectangular, measuring 11m x 12.5m and is, therefore, a rather small example of this type of house, compared with some from Buto which measure 22.5m by The magnetic scan of the main tell, showing the location of area A/II in the centre 22.5m. The foundation of the house is about one metre deep, while the thickness of the walls is from 1.30m to 1.70m, so that the walls in the foundation level are c.40cm wider than at ground level. Felix Arnold’s reconstruction of a house of this type at Elephantine, and his calculations show that a wall 1.15m wide can support up to five floors. This would have been possible for the building in Tell el-Daba, where we also find the typical pan-bedded brickwork. While Late Period casemate buildings are often only preserved as foundations, in the higher western part of the tell the remains of standing walls are still preserved, with the ground level indicated by a large limestone threshold in the middle of the western wall. Many of the house models show an elevated entrance with a staircase, but in our building the entrance was at the same height as the ground level both outside and inside the building. In the inner north-western corner of the house an interesting assemblage of material was found, including an
The plan of the excavated tower house in Area A/II
A pan-bedded mud-brick wall of the tower house in Area A/II
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