446 ANNUAL KEPOET SMITHSONIAN INSTITUTION^ 1915. 



ing everything before them, although the experience of millenniums 

 should have taught them better. The difference of level which thus 

 far could be established between the floor of house Q 48, 3 and 

 that of N 47, 6 amounts to 4.50 meters which is quite a marked 

 difference considering that these houses are only about 4:80 meters 

 apart. The same mistake was made in the palace of Amenophis 

 III, south of Medinet Tlabu, and elsewhere. The ancient Egyptian 

 architects were, however, not alone in committing this error, for 

 their modern colleagues and even Europeans building in Egypt do 

 no better. As a result of this thoughtlessness and carelessness of 

 transient engineers, parts of the railway dams, even in the recent 

 decades, have often been swept away by floods, and in 1895 an en- 

 tire corner of the place of Heluan in Cairo was carried off'. 



The appearance of the excavations in the Wadi differs from that 

 in the rest of the city area. Elsewhere the house ruins appear as 

 flat, desert hills where the still remaining upper rows of masonry 

 are brought to light with the first stroke of the pick. In the Wadi 

 a layer of sand or pebble, 0.5 to 1 meter deep, must first be removed 

 before the upper parts of the walls, 1.5 meter or more in height, ap- 

 pear. The debris between the walls is here also more compact, due 

 to alluviation and not merel}^ to the rubbish from the upper build- 

 ings. 



As the Wadis, which now form a break in the city area, must once 

 have been fully built up, the extensive interruption of the ruin field 

 in the neighborhood of the modern cemetery of Et-Till must be con- 

 sidered as only incidental, and those parts of the ruins formerl}^ 

 termed northern settlements must once have been directly connected 

 with the present main part of the city. 



We thus obtain a city area of about 7 kilometers from north to 

 south with a greatest width of only 1.5 kilometers. This elongated 

 form of the city, probably in part conditioned by its location along 

 the river, is accounted for chiefly through its origin, which is even 

 now clearly perceptible. The city was built on a long street which 

 ran parallel to the course of the river or, since the river limited its 

 development on the west side, more toward the east on the main street. 

 This main street, which probably already existed as a country road 

 when the city was founded, originally connected the palace and temple 

 quarters near modern Et-Till with the similarly important quarter 

 at the modern village Hagg Qandil. This main thoroughfare still 

 exists as a connecting road between these villages, and appears on the 

 plan (pi. 1) between the premises M 47, ^6 and M 47, 1. The first 

 plan of the city was probably limited to the building up of both sides 

 of the main street and later other broad streets were laid out, running 

 parallel to the main thoroughfare, but bending toward it from the 



