Alexandria's ancient expats

Having watched progressive excavation and restoration of the Roman settlement at Kom Al-Dikka for four decades Jill Kamil regards conservation of the mosaics in the "Villa of the Birds" as a highlight
Back in the 1960s, when I first saw the ruins of the elegant Roman theatre (odeon) being excavated at Kom Al-Dikka, the extent of Roman urban settlement was unknown. The then Egyptian Antiquities Organisation had just purchased a military area beside Kom Al-Dikka in the heart of Alexandria. A Polish-Egyptian team started to excavate the area and made a series of noteworthy discoveries.
North of the elegant Roman theatre (which measures some 40,000 square metres and has marble seating for 700-800 people), the team unearthed a residential area, with public baths, cisterns, houses, shops and streets. Work over successive archaeological seasons also led to the discovery of a complex of private villas dating from the first century AD and belonging to high-ranking officials and wealthy citizens.
Roman communities sprang up across Egypt after the conquest in 30 BC. But few survived long. This transience challenges scholars looking to recreate Roman life in Egypt. The locations of theatres and even race courses are known, and literary evidence from dump heaps, conserved and transcribed by generations of scholars, tells us much about Roman community life. But equally, much of everyday Roman living in Egypt remains a mystery. Therefore, the discovery of elegant private homes, some with the remains of mosaic flooring, has been an unexpected fillip for scholars.
The floor mosaics have particularly thrilled excavators. They add colour and detail to the picture of Roman life now being drawn. Floor mosaics have long been known to be an ornamental feature of Roman interior decor. Those unearthed in Alexandria feature in houses with central courts, surrounded by columns. Most were in ruin when they were discovered.
For 40 years, excavation has run parallel with restoration. The Polish Centre for Archaeology has been working the site, first with the Graeco-Roman Museum in Alexandria and subsequently in collaboration with Egypt's Supreme Council of Antiquities. Some striking finds stand out.
One of the most unusual, found on the site of the future Alexandria Library, is a mosaic in a private house which has a dog wearing a red collar as its central medallion. The dog sits before a broken jug, its tail curling around its hind legs. The mosaic is made of tiny tesserae (mosaic bricks) only a few millimetres across. This is typical of the work of the second century. Patterns are composed of small cubes of variously coloured stone or marble.
The dining room of another Roman house, excavated in the garden of the former British Consulate in Alexandria, yields a plain mosaic floor. It is decorated with a single rosette at its centre. Red bands around the edges mark places for chairs and divans. A square mosaic 'doormat' guards the entrance.
One discovery has caught archaeologists by surprise. No one expected an illustrious family of the period, the householder of the newly-restored Villa of the Birds, to choose to live south of the theatre rather than in the popular residential area to the north. The family's villa was discovered below street level; a coin found beneath the decorative flooring dates it to the year 133. Such discoveries add subtle insights into the social patterns of the time.
The mosaics in the Villa of the Birds originally came to light in 1970 and thrilled observers. One particularly beautiful segment shows a duck near the villa door. Another large surviving section takes the form of a circle inscribed in a large frame filled with alternating triangles. The contrasting white marble and red porphyry creates a colourful geometric composition. The mosaics are magnificent.
"Mosaics were an extremely popular architectural feature," says Grzegorz Majcherek, director of Polish excavations at Kom Al-Dikka. "These colourful and rich works of art enhance any excavation," he adds.
Conservationists now face a conundrum. What to do with the mosaics? Should they be removed to a museum, or conserved where they are?
"This is one of the dilemmas facing scholars," Majcherek says. "Earlier, we tended to remove what we could. But during the last two decades, attempts have been made to preserve mosaics in situ."
Early experiments were a success. Therefore, it was with great enthusiasm, and some trepidation, that the Kom Al-Dikka mission decided to conserve the mosaics of the Villa of the Birds where they are. "We decided to conserve the villa, and its mosaics, with minimum intervention," says Majcherek.
Such an ambitious task requires funds, and while avenues were explored, the team was forced to re-bury the villa to preserve the mosaics intact. In 1998, the Egyptian-Polish mission launched an appeal for funds. Responses were good. USAID provided the necessary funds and, with the help of the American Research Centre in Egypt, the villa was re-exposed and work begun.
When I visited the site of the Villa of the Birds early in the restoration programme, it was difficult to identify the villa. Structures from later periods were superimposed on its ruined walls. To the uninitiated, the site appeared a rubble mass. I was sceptical whether the obviously beautiful mosaics and ceramic fragments littered about the ruin and embedded in the earth, could be retrieved, sorted out, and restored.
It was, of course, a challenging task and one that had to be carried out in several stages. First the villa, buried for some 2,000 years, had to be released from the heavy load of later structures. Walls had to be removed to reach the original building. A protective roof had to be erected. Engineers milled around the site.
Unrest during ancient times made the excavators' task yet harder. The villa is believed to have suffered serious damage, perhaps in the third century, as a result of political strife in the reign of Diocletian. Its window panes were smashed, wooden beams were burned, and the mosaics bulged in the great heat.
As conservationists exposed the mosaics and collected the fragments for the restoration, they encountered another hurdle. It interested them to observe that the Romans themselves carried out some restoration. But they worked less painstakingly than their modern counterparts. The "repaired area" is clearly visible.
But eventually all these obstacles were largely overcome. Last month I went to see the newly-opened Villa of the Birds, now a museum, and the first to be opened in Alexandria for the last 30 years. I was bowled over: not only by the restoration of the mosaics, especially those of the birds, but also by the manner in which the site has been developed for public presentation. The museum is set in a delightful green area (courtesy of the governorate of Alexandria). It is glassed in with walkways giving clear views of the mosaics. More than any other relic of the Roman past, the museum reveals the comfort and luxury enjoyed by the aristocrats of Alexandria in the early centuries of our era.
An interesting pastime revealed by the excavations is the passion for baths among the wall born. Although the residents of the Villa of Birds had no private bathing facilities, excavation in the settlement site to the north unveils interesting details of their water and drainage system. Big stoves around basins show that bath water could be adjusted to the required temperature. Channels show how water flowed from tanks through the heating system and basins and out through drains. Bathing was plainly a priority.
Visitors to Kom Al-Dikka can now walk from the Villa of the Birds through the great odeon, with its tiered seating and restored columns, to the residential area to the north. There visitors will find the complex's large bath houses, now in ruin, built of brick, and creatively decorated with marble floors and walls of painted plaster. It is Alexandria's most impressive site.
Practical information
Kom Al-Dikka is bordered by Horriya, Nabi Daniel, Abdel-Moneim and Safiya Zaghlul streets.
Entrance fee LE5. No charge for taking photographs
More about mosaics
Attempts to use the stone cube for wall mosaics were unsuccessful in early centuries, because stone cubes are heavy. But Alexandria was a centre for glass production so glass cubes inevitably proved suitable for fixing on walls. They were lighter in weight, more luminous, and could be coated with gold or silver dust.
Egyptian glass reached a peak of perfection in the Roman period. It was made from quartz mixed with calcium carbonate, to which natron or plant ash was added along with colouring material. The mixture was fused in clay moulds or rolled or flattened into designs that were used for inlay. Experiments were carried out in the techniques of glass-working and glass-blowing and marvellous opaque glass, perfume jars, candle holders, lamps, chalices and vases were exported to all Mediterranean countries. Sometimes vases, or even tiny figures, were made on a sandy clay core and shaped as desired.
From Alexandria's vast glass factories, glass cubes were shipped all over the Roman world, from Rome to Constantinople, where mosaics of great delicacy were created between the fifth and sixth centuries.
Was glass a Graeco-Roman invention? Far from it. Glass glaze was used in Pharaonic times, and beautiful glass vessels during the 18th dynasty (1567-1320 BC).
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