Daughters of Isis(25)

The more typical Egyptian village must have appeared very much like its modern counterpart, with closely-packed thick-walled houses of varying size arranged higgledy-piggledy along narrow passageways and courtyards, and new buildings or extensions springing up as and when required with absolutely no formal planning procedure. The average villager probably lived in a modest four- or five-roomed house which would have been home to the extended family, the family dependants, the family pets, the foodstores and perhaps a few birds and a sheep or two being raised for food. It is perhaps fortunate for family sanity that due to the good weather most tasks could be performed out of doors, either in front of the house, in the yard or on the useful flat roof, and the overcrowded homes were frequently little more than bases used for eating and sleeping.

The houses, especially the better built ones, admirably suit the Egyptian climate. There is only one thing lacking to make them really pleasant places to live, and that is greater cleanliness within the houses themselves and within the streets. The salvation of the people lies in the fact that they lead essentially an outdoor life, the houses being regarded almost solely as places to sleep and cook in; otherwise the mortality would be considerably higher than it is.

Miss Blackman’s comments on modern Egyptian village housing



Town and city houses were generally smaller than their village counterparts and, as land within the walled town was at a premium, they were often built in terraced rows without the luxury of a garden or yard. To compensate for their enforced narrowness the houses grew upwards, and homes two, or even three, storeys high were designed. Actual depictions of urban life are rare, but it is clear that the towns were very densely occupied and in certain more central quarters rather squalid, with the tall buildings crammed together around the important public buildings and excluding the light from the narrow streets. Purpose-built housing complexes such as Deir el-Medina or Amarna, with their organized ranks of neat buildings arranged along straight streets and right-angled road junctions, give a false impression of the efficiency of Egyptian urban planning; these towns were atypical in being conceived for one purpose and built relatively quickly by the state. In contrast, the long-established centres of trade and commerce evolved slowly and randomly. The lack of any official sanitation or waste-disposal system, the overcrowded conditions and the ubiquitous presence of the animals needed for food must have made town life at times unappealing, if not downright unhygienic, particularly during the long hot summer days; the attractions of country life must have been widely felt.

Preserved on the wall of the Theban tomb of Djehutynefer, a New Kingdom Royal Scribe and Overseer of the Treasury, is a complete sectional plan of his comparatively spacious town house, built in one of the more salubrious areas of uptown Thebes. It appears to have been at least three storeys high, although given the conventions of Egyptian art these layers may actually represent various parts of the house lying one behind the other. The lowest floor, or basement, was apparently the servants’ quarters, where the mundane domestic activities such as breadmaking, brewing and weaving could proceed out of sight of the owner and his family. The elegantly tall public reception rooms on the first floor had high windows designed to maximize coolness and must have been suitably impressive for distinguished visitors, while the top level included the private and less formal family and women’s rooms. Five conical grain-silos were placed on the flat roof, which was also apparently used for some cooking and food processing, although the logic behind placing the grain storage on the roof is not immediately apparent; perhaps it reduced the number of vermin infesting the grain? Such luxurious town houses were very much a privilege of the wealthy, and artisans lived in far less splendid accommodation, rarely having access to more than three or four narrow rooms plus the flat roof which could be sheltered from the sun by simple screens and used as an outdoor room.



Fig. 13 Woman carrying domestic provisions

The homes built for the Theban necropolis workers at Deir el-Medina were all identically long and narrow, measuring about 15 × 5 metres. They included a square reception area leading into a larger inner room, a storage room or small bedroom, and a small courtyard which served as a kitchen and which often included an underground storage area. External stairs led up to the roof where the entire family probably slept during the heat of the summer. At Amarna, a less prosperous town, the most menial labourers were housed in very cramped accommodation, with each of the seventy-two housing units measuring only 5 × 10 metres. These houses were divided into a main living area, a bedroom or storage area and a kitchen, while the porch was used to shelter animals and the roof served as an additional room. Dotted among these rather squalid houses were the larger homes built for the artisans; square-shaped dwellings with a large, columned reception room, several bedrooms and storage rooms and an outside cooking area.