amarna
by Ishtār van Looy
Design information
Amarna is a semi-glyphic humanist sans-serif typeface, designed for dual use in both titling and
text.
It derives inspiration from the wonderfully earthy, almost terminally groovy typefaces coming out of the
United Kingdom from the 1920s up to the ‘40s, most notably Berthold Wolpe’s Albertus (Monotype, 1932).
There’s something that’s just so appealing to me about the typefaces of this era — it’s
clear to me that at this point in time, the novelty of the sans-serif typeface had not quite worn off.
Looking at these early typefaces, it still feels like the designers of the era, used to drawing the sinuous
curves and high-contrast strokes of the serif typefaces of the day, were still working out the kinks.
Albertus, in particular — there’s something really nice about the very odd juxtaposition between its
grandiose, old-fashioned capitals and their haughty proportions, compared to the tall, blocky and amicable
lower-case letterforms, with their low stroke contrast, high x-height and wide-open apertures. And yet,
somehow, those two extremes are made to complement each other beautifully.
I wanted to capture some of this dissonance in Amarna, while tempering it slightly with some more modern
elements, bringing it up to speed with the demands of current-day designers.
I’ve attempted to strike a balance between the old-fashioned proportions of typefaces like Albertus
and the more uniform proportions that are idiomatic of modern sans-serif typefaces. Compared to Albertus,
I’ve also made the lower-case a little more slender, a little more readable, allowing Amarna to be
used more easily for body text typesetting (I've always found long strings of mixed-case text set in
Albertus hard to read).
Otherwise, I’ve tried to maintain as much as I can of Albertus and its ilk.
That era produced some of my favourite typefaces; I can only hope that Amarna is a fitting tribute.
Bivalve
Ungulate
Carboniferous
Microarchaeological
Brachiopodes
Carbonize
I still remember the day when the Iraq Museum consisted of one shelf, half full of antiquities. Thereafter
Gertrude Bell acquired a brick building near the Tigris which was to serve for some twenty years as Iraq’s
first Museum of Antiquities. This has now been succeeded by a great building equipped in the most modern
fashion and houses one of the richest collections of Sumerian and Mesopotamian antiquities in existence.
This achievement stands ultimately to the credit of Gertrude Bell who, incidentally, left a legacy for the
foundation of the British School of Archaeology in Iraq. But perhaps the most arduous task of all was at the
beginning of the season. I used to go down with the foremen as advance party and such was the nature of the
dust storms at Ur that one wing of the house, after the summer, was buried up to the roof under the sand,
which usually took three days to shovel away. It was quite a heavy job to make the expedition house
presentable, but in spite of the severity of the summer and the extraordinary dryness we were also liable to
terrible rainstorms in the late autumn, they were the tail end of the monsoon from India. During the
excavations we employed 200-250 men, sometimes less, sometimes more. They worked for us from sunrise to
sunset with an interval of half an hour for breakfast and an hour for luncheon. It was a strenuous day’s
work for which they were paid at the rate of one rupee, the equivalent of about eighteen pence. In addition,
“bakshish”, that is tips, were awarded for all small finds as an encouragement to them to keep their eyes
open. The gangs consisted of a pickman, a spademan and four, five or six basketmen according to the distance
which the soil had to be carried. In addition there was a small gang of about eight men who worked our two
trucks on the light railway. In the course of four or five years an esprit de corps had developed, as it
always will, if men are well led, bound by a common purpose and made to feel a sense of pride in their work.
Nonetheless we did experience one lapse of conscience. We found one grave which, we were certain from
previous discoveries, must have contained a golden frontlet on the forehead of the deceased. When we came to
clear the earth, it was not there — one of the men had abstracted it at an unwatched moment. On casting over
in our minds who might have been the thief out of our 170 men we agreed that whilst it might have been any
one out of 169 that had done the deed, only one workman whom we had named ‘Honest John Thomas’, must be
innocent. On the next pay day therefore, Woolley asked the men if, one by one as they came up to the
pay-table for their money, they would agree to swear their innocence on the Koran, and in chorus they
assented to do so, under the eyes of the Chief of Police from Nasiriyah. About I50 men in succession swore
that they were innocent, but when the guilty one was about to touch the book all of them rose as one man and
pointed the finger of condemnation rather than witness the awful act of perjury which was about to be
perpetrated: the guilty one was Honest John Thomas, who, like Iago, had over the years deliberately built up
a reputation for honesty. Had we been wiser we would have remembered our Shakespeare.
The earliest remains of human habitation which Woolley revealed at Ur were found at the bottom of a great
excavated shaft, 50 feet below the surface. Deep down in the bowels of the earth he passed through many
levels of stratified occupation which ran from the end of the Early Dynastic period about 2500 BC, through a
large number of earlier sequences including Uruk and Jamdat Nasr, the periods at which writing was invented
and first developed. Below these he observed a deep band of sandy alluvial clay interspersed as might be
expected with grains of aeolian, windblown sand. Woolley, who had previously found similar but shallower
deposits near by and had heard from Watelin of flood levels at Kish, soon came to the conclusion that here
he was in the presence of something significant. When he related his observations and read out his field
notes to his wife, Katherine Woolley, and asked her what he had found, her quick intelligence immediately
gave him the desired response — the Flood. The ‘Great Flood’, according to the eleventh tablet of the
Gilgamesh Epic, had overwhelmed and destroyed mankind. Only one family, that of Ut-napishtim, the Sumerian
Noah, had been saved, prompted by a merciful God to escape together with the males and females of an
appropriate assortment of livestock. This was the Flood remembered in the Book of Genesis and recorded in
the story of Noah. Many of the details, in particular the sending out of birds from the Ark were
sufficiently close to the early cuneiform record to prove that this ancient Mesopotamian tradition had
survived, doubtless through Canaanite records, into the Hebrew scriptures of the Old Testament. Here was a
discovery after Woolley’s heart; a plausible authentification of the Old Testament record, for the
excitement of the Bible-reading public, and Woolley, a brilliant journalist, made the best of it.
Woolley’s most important discovery at Ur — and the second in antiquity — was the Royal Cemetery which
brought forth a wealth of Sumerian treasure, the like of which had never been seen before and is never
likely to be seen again. Woolley excavated and recorded more than two thousand graves, for the most part of
the Early Dynastic period about 2750–2450 BC, and there were others which provided brilliant evidence of
Sargonid art in the twenty-fourth century BC, followed by a series of great corbel-vaulted brick tombs of
the Third Dynasty of Ur. This marvellous excavation revealed in the most striking way Woolley’s strengths
and weaknesses. No other man alive, and no one today, could have coped with this gigantic task as the finds
poured in. The Antiquities Room was filled to the brim; there was gold scattered under our beds, and it says
much for the security of Iraq under the British Mandate and for the vigilance of our good Sheikh Munshid of
the Ghazi, that we were never raided or attacked, for rumour soon spread that among other things we had
found a solid golden sphinx. The masterly direction of this complicated operation is a tribute to Woolley’s
capacity for organization: no grave out of the two thousand or so went unplotted. This was achieved both
with the tape and the prismatic compass as a check and it was no mean feat to take a reading in a high wind
or a sandstorm when the needle waggled and spun to and fro like a ballet dancer. Woolley’s choice of a
boundary for the dig at a point where the stratification of the soil was most clearly legible was judicious.
Here at a glance the observer could see the complete sequence of deposits through the mound on waste ground
that had been used as a cemetery for a period of about three hundred and fifty years. Woolley appreciated
the fact that over the whole cemetery area there ran a sealed stratum which gave a terminal date for its
end. In other words, that everything underlying that stratum could not be later than the latest objects
contained within it, and these consisted of seal impressions in a style familiar to Mesopotamian
archaeologists.
Unfortunately, Woolley tended to have preconceived ideas and was determined to prove that his finds were
older than anything of the kind hitherto discovered. In particular, he was bent on proving that the
beginnings of civilization in Mesopotamia were older than the beginnings in Egypt, a misconception which led
him and some of his colleagues astray. He preferred to play a lone hand and was reluctant to consult
authority, particularly when he had built up a chronological framework which he considered to be
satisfactory. Therefore he concluded that the terminal stratum above the Royal Cemetery contained nothing
later than impressions of the First Dynasty of Ur which he dated to about 3100 BC. In this he was wrong, for
some of the sealings were Sargonid, to be dated after 2400 BC; and likewise he dated the stratum below the
bottom of the Royal Cemetery earlier than the evidence warranted. Moreover, the seal impressions underlying,
and therefore earlier than the Cemetery, are apparently not older than the period known as Early Dynastic I.
The royal graves can comfortably be accommodated between Early Dynastic II and Early Dynastic III, and most
of them within the latter period. The bulk of the royal tombs is now generally accepted as falling between
about 2750 BC and 2500 BC, and many of the commoners’ graves are two centuries later still. Egypt was his
bugbear and distracted him from the truth. We can no longer agree with the assessment made in “Ur of the
Chaldees” (p. 88): “When Egypt does make a start, the beginnings of a new age are marked by the introduction
of models and ideas which derived from an older civilization which, as we know now, had long been developing
and flourishing in the Euphrates Valley, and to the Sumerians we can trace much that is at the root of…
Egyptian art and thought.” For Woolley’s not inconsiderable error there was a fair excuse at the time, for
the dating of early seals was then in its infancy, and he in fact was producing the evidence that enabled
the chronology to be established on a scientific basis. To his eternal credit is the written and graphic
record which has put Babylonian chronology of the third millennium BC on soundly based lines. The fact is
that both civilizations, Egyptian and Sumerian, developed more or less in step, and that is what Woolley’s
own excavations have demonstrated.
The sight of the Royal Cemetery when we were in full cry was amazing — and I recall that one of the royal
tombs, which contained no less than 74 bodies buried alive at the bottom of the deep royal shaft, appeared,
when exposed, to be a golden carpet ornamented with the beech leaf head-dresses of the ladies of the court,
and overlaid by gold and silver harps and lyres which had played the funeral dirge to the end. The task of
selecting the most striking and important of the multifarious objects discovered in the Royal Cemetery would
be an invidious one. But I think one must give a place of high honour to the first of the treasures to be
found, in 1926: the famous gold dagger, intact in its lattice-work sheath, the elegant lapis lazuli handle
embellished with golden studs. At that time there was nothing comparable and a well-known archaeologist, de
Mecquenem, mistakenly pronounced that it could not be Sumerian but must have been made under the Italian
Renaissance. The quantity of lapis lazuli found in the tombs was remarkable and indicated a trade with the
distant mines of Badakshan, in what is now Afghanistan. It is probable that the Sumerian demand for this
stone exhausted the best veins of these mines, for never again has lapis lazuli been attested in such large
quantities. Many of the golden vessels, thought by some critics to be barbaric, were sensitive works of art,
as delicate in feeling and in controlled strength as the finest Queen Anne silver — for example, a little
fluted trough-shaped silver lamp still in a pristine condition, a masterpiece. No less striking were the
musical instruments with bulls’ and stags’ heads; the lapis lazuli and shell mosaic box labelled as a ‘Royal
Standard’ by Woolley was, in my opinion, the sounding box of a lyre. Most remarkable was Queen Shubad’s
(Pu-abi’s) wig overlaid with golden ribbons, and the hundreds of superb lapis and carnelian beads discovered
in her tomb. Perhaps pride of place should be given to the sumptuous electrum, hammered and chased wig of
Prince Mes-kalam-dug, with its side flaps pierced to carry leather protectors and its perforated ears. Nor
should we forget the lovely little golden onager or wild ass, which decorated the yoke pole found on one of
the chariots in the shaft grave. But the catalogue continues endlessly. The variety and quantity of the
objects found is significant of a lively trade connection with Anatolia and Iran, especially Susiana and
Elam. Recently it has become apparent that some of the stone vessels were probably imported from as far
afield as the Kerman district of south central Iran. The freedom of movement and widespread ramifications of
trade in this period, Early Dynastic III, were remarkable and gradually developed over the centuries.