Built from the river
Most Egyptians lived in houses of mudbrick, that is, Nile mud mixed with straw or dung, pressed into wooden moulds and dried in the sun for a few days. It was free, it was everywhere, and a family could make thousands of bricks in a season. Stone was kept for the eternal buildings, temples and tombs, while the houses of the living, even the king’s palaces, were built of earth.
Mud has one great quality in a hot, dry climate. It is heavy and dense, so it takes a long time to warm up and a long time to cool down. A thick mudbrick wall works like a clay pot left in the shade: in the afternoon it is still cool inside, at night it gives back the heat it slowly absorbed. Walls were built thick, plastered with mud and whitewashed to reflect the sun. Windows were small and placed high, sometimes closed by stone or wooden grilles, so that light came in but direct sun and blowing sand did not.
Living on the roof
Roofs were flat, made of palm trunks covered with reed mats and a thick layer of mud. A staircase, inside or against an outside wall, led up to them, and in practice the roof was an extra room. People dried fish and fruit there, stored fuel, worked in the evening breeze, and in summer slept under the stars, out of the heat trapped indoors. Ovens and grain grinding usually stayed outside the living rooms, in a courtyard or a roofless back room, to keep smoke and heat away from where people slept.
A street of tomb builders: Deir el-Medina
The best-known Egyptian village is Deir el-Medina, on the west bank of Luxor, home of the craftsmen who cut and painted the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. It was a planned settlement: about 68 houses on some 5,600 square metres, inside a wall, along a single main street. The houses are narrow and deep, all built to the same plan and then changed by their owners over the generations.
You stepped down from the street into a first room with a raised brick platform in one corner, enclosed like a box bed and often decorated with images of the household god Bes. Whether it was a bed, a family altar or the place where women gave birth is still debated. Behind it came the main room, taller, with a column holding up the roof, a bench and a small window high in the wall. At the back were a kitchen open to the sky, a cellar dug in the floor for storage, and the stairs to the roof. The village had no well. Water arrived on donkeys, brought by water carriers paid by the state, and the villagers’ own notes on pottery fragments record the deliveries.
Bathrooms at Amarna
Amarna, the capital founded by Akhenaten around 1346 BCE and abandoned soon after his death, is the place to see how the better-off lived, because the city was occupied for less than twenty years and never built over. Large houses stood in walled plots with gardens, granaries and wells. At their centre was a tall hall lit by high windows, surrounded by smaller rooms. Next to the owner’s bedroom, many had a bathroom: a limestone slab with a raised rim set into the floor, where a servant poured water over the bather, with a spout to carry the water away into a jar. Some also had a latrine, a limestone seat with a slot over a pot of sand.
Ordinary people at Amarna lived in much smaller houses squeezed between the big ones, which shows that rich and poor shared the same neighbourhoods. A house in a city like Memphis probably worked the same way, but there the mudbrick has melted back into the fields.
Why so few houses survive
If houses were everywhere, why do we know so few? Because they stood on the floodplain, close to the fields, where later towns grew on top of them and the river buried them in silt, and because mudbrick dissolves when it gets wet. Farmers have also dug ancient mudbrick for centuries to use as fertiliser, a crumbly soil called sebakh. The houses we can study survive mostly at the edge of the desert, in places built for a special purpose and then abandoned: Deir el-Medina for the tomb builders, Amarna for a king’s short-lived capital, and Kahun (Lahun), a town laid out on a grid for the builders of Senusret II’s pyramid and excavated by Flinders Petrie in 1889-90. The rest comes from images, such as the paintings of Nebamun, with its garden pool, and from wooden models placed in tombs.
Where to see them
Deir el-Medina, on the west bank of Luxor, lets you walk along the village street between the stone footings of the houses; the painted tombs of its craftsmen are just above. Amarna, near Minya in Middle Egypt, is less visited and needs more planning. The models from the tomb of Meketre are divided between the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Egyptian museums in Cairo. Check opening times with the Egyptian Ministry of Tourism and Antiquities.
Sources
- UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, “Mud-Brick Architecture” (2011) and “Deir el-Medina (Development)” (2011).
- The Amarna Project, “Main City” and house reports.
- UCL, Digital Egypt for Universities, “Lahun (Kahun)”.
- The Metropolitan Museum of Art, “Model of a Porch and Garden” (20.3.13).
- B. Kemp, The City of Akhenaten and Nefertiti: Amarna and Its People (2012).
- D. Driaux, “Water supply of ancient Egyptian settlements” (2016).
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