Houses in Ancient Egypt: Types, Construction, Layout | Middle East And North Africa

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ANCIENT EGYPTIAN HOMES

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models of homes
Unlinke ancient Egyptian temples, which were made of stones, ancient Egyptian houses had walls of Nile mud; instead of gigantic pillars, they had wooden supports; instead of stone roofs, they had rafters of palm trunks. [Source: Adolph Erman, “Life in Ancient Egypt”, 1894]

The Nile mud offered an easy workable material, that for buildings which were not to endure for ever it would have seemed absurd to substitute it by quarried stone. The climate also had to be considered; a building was required which kept off the violent heat of the sun, but allowed plenty of air to enter cvervwhere; a solid stone building would scarcely have been pleasant during the great summer heat of Upper Egypt. A light structure with small airy rooms, with hangings of matting over the windows, situated amongst shady trees — and if possible near the cool water — made more sene and such was the house best fitted for the Egyptian climate.

The ruins of the towns having disappeared, it is very difficult to form an idea of an ancient Egyptian dwelling-house, were it not for models of houses found as grave goods in some tombs and some coffins in the form of houses belonging to the time of the Old Kingdom. If we look at the picture of the coffin of King Menkaure (Dynasty IV) which once stood in his pyramid at Giza we see at the first glance that it represents a house. This house had three doors on the long side and one on the short side; above each was a latticed window. Graceful little pillars, projecting slighty) from the wall, support the beams, on which rests the concave portion of the flat roof. A mere glance convinces us that this house was built by a carpenter and not by a mason; we can see clearly how the horizontal beams fit into those that are vertical. There are no large wall-spaces as there are in brickwork; the whole house is put together of thin laths and planks. Trunks of palms are used only at the corners and for the beams of the roof .

Websites on Ancient Egypt: UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, escholarship.org ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Egypt sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Discovering Egypt discoveringegypt.com; BBC History: Egyptians bbc.co.uk/history/ancient/egyptians ; Ancient History Encyclopedia on Egypt ancient.eu/egypt; Digital Egypt for Universities. Scholarly treatment with broad coverage and cross references (internal and external). Artifacts used extensively to illustrate topics. ucl.ac.uk/museums-static/digitalegypt ; British Museum: Ancient Egypt ancientegypt.co.uk; Egypt’s Golden Empire pbs.org/empires/egypt; Metropolitan Museum of Art www.metmuseum.org ; Oriental Institute Ancient Egypt (Egypt and Sudan) Projects ; Egyptian Antiquities at the Louvre in Paris louvre.fr/en/departments/egyptian-antiquities; KMT: A Modern Journal of Ancient Egypt kmtjournal.com; Egypt Exploration Society ees.ac.uk ; Amarna Project amarnaproject.com; Abzu: Guide to Resources for the Study of the Ancient Near East etana.org; Egyptology Resources fitzmuseum.cam.ac.uk

Ancient Egyptian Construction and Architecture

In ancient Egypt trees were scarce so wood was not widely used as a building material. Mud, clay, rock and reed were the only materials that were in abundance. The ancient Egyptian first lived in reed houses and later switched to unbaked mud brick, which was used even on palaces. Around 2,700 B.C. they developed a method of constructing buildings from stone and within half a century they were building pyramids, and within a century and half they built the Great Pyramid of Cheops.

"How and why their unexcelled techniques for building in stone were so quickly perfected still puzzles historians," the historian Daniel Boorstin wrote. "How did they quarry huge blocks of limestone, transport them for miles, then raise, place and fit them with jewelers precision? All without the aid of a capstan, a pulley, [beast of burden] or even a wheeled vehicle!" [Source: Daniel Boorstin, "The Creators"]

Egyptian architecture most likely had its roots in wood or clay. An indication of this is the practice of "battered walls." This means that they slant upwards from a broad base. These slanting walls are topped by horizontal molding on which leaf and stem patterns are often carved or painted. These patterns are reminders of a time when walls were built of matting stiffened with long reds or tree branches and covered with clay. Such walls can only stand vertically if they are low: higher walls are built at a slant. Walls made of stone don’t need to slant, but the practice of slanting continued after stone came into use.

Large houses, temples and tombs all had similar plans — with a main court, hall and private rooms — that was also found in Greek architecture. The Egyptians and Assyrians used enamel bricks to decorate their buildings. The Greeks and Romans were masters of using enamels to make jewelry.

Different Types of Ancient Egyptian Housing

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House Funerary model garden
There was of course a great difference between one house and another. In the countryside, the houses of the peasants were likely mud huts like those of the fellahin of modern Egypt. In more urbanized areas, people liveding with a small household in the narrow streets of the town would perhaps consist merely of a small court with a few rooms at the back, and a flight of steps leading up to the flat roof This is the plan of the better sort of village houses in Egypt now, and corresponds with some small models of houses in our museums, though the latter probably represent store-houses rather than dwelling-houses. [Source: Adolph Erman, “Life in Ancient Egypt”, 1894]

The models of houses found in tombs somewhat resemble a box gives the usual character of these small dwellinghouses. It seems to represent a house with thick slanting walls of mud replaced by thin walls of laths below the windows; above is a small upper story open to the flat roof in front. A thick pillar, probably of mud, like the similar supports in modern Egyptian houses, forms the only decoration of the little house.

On the other hand, the great lord who lived in his park outside the town was not content with a building of this sort; he wanted a house for himself, another for his wife, another for the kitchen, a reception hall for distinguished guests, a provision house, dwellings for the servants, etc. As is the case now in the East, a palace of this kind must really have constituted a town-quarter.

Development of Housing in Ancient Egypt

Virginia L. Emery of the University of Chicago wrote: “Slim as it is, archaeological evidence records a transition from prehistoric, single-room pit houses and wattle and daub structures with courtyards, hearths, and grain storage at Merimde, Omari, Hammamiya, and Maadi to the multi-chambered, rectangular courtyard houses of historic times. This courtyard- centered abode was so foundational it even became the hieroglyph pr, meaning house or enclosure. By the New Kingdom, houses more commonly were constructed around a central living room, rather than a hypaethral courtyard, as a logical development from the courtyard-centered house; suites of bedrooms with bathing facilities and administrative spaces would have been accessed either from the courtyard or the living room, depending on the focus of the house. Architecturally, a distinction arose between country or estate houses, which tended to be larger domiciles with a variety of subsidiary structures for work and storage and town houses, which were constructed on smaller plots of land and therefore were all- inclusive, with the work and storage areas integrated into the house proper.[Source: Virginia L. Emery, University of Chicago, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology 2011, escholarship.org ]

“Two categories of urban housing can be distinguished, based primarily on the organization of the urban setting: planned towns, especially those attached to royal funerary monuments, are attested from the Old Kingdom at Giza, including the complex of Khentkawes, from the Middle Kingdom at el-Lahun, and from the New Kingdom at Deir el-Medina and at the workmen’s village at Amarna; these planned towns were composed of regularly laid out houses of nearly identical plan, though frequently with size differentiation reflecting an administrative hierarchy. The Nubian fortresses of the Middle and New Kingdoms provide another example of planned urban (or semi-urban) settings, though were unique in their entirely self- contained nature (only Buhen appears to have possessed an attached settlement) and in their need to be adapted to the local topography for defensive reasons.

house model in the Louvre

“Less systematically planned towns, such as Thebes , would have offered greater flexibility in style of house plan, though construction still was constrained by plot size. In such urban settings, houses were constructed with two or more stories to make the best possible use of space. By the Ptolemaic Period (304–30 B.C.), these multi-storied town houses were constructed with a concave foundation and battered walls, reaching up to three stories and being provided with vaulted cellars. Unfortunately, it is primarily the first level of these structures that survives, making it difficult to reconstruct the upper floors with any certainty; generally, the vaulted rooms of the cellars were employed for storage, with the vaults providing structural support for stairs leading to the upper stories. The construction of these houses from the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods is marked by the increased use (and survival) of wood in the corners of the structures and the better preservation of wooden window casings, doors, jambs, and lintels. Contemporary with these tower houses are examples of houses arranged around a peristyle courtyard, an architectural style harkening back to the Middle Kingdom but reinterpreted during the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods in light of the influence of Mediterranean architecture. Houses dating to the Ptolemaic and Roman Periods have been studied most extensively at Karanis, but are also known from Philadelphia, Theadelphia, Qasr Qarun, and Dimai in the Fayum, and in the Nile valley at Hermopolis, Medinet Habu, Armant, Edfu, and Elephantine.”

New Kingdom Two-Story Country House in Thebes

A typical two-storied New Kingdom (1570-1069 B.C.) house of relatively well-off individual in Thebes was bare on the outside. It had smooth white-washed brick walls, and the plain white surface was only varied by the projecting frames of the door and windows. The ground floor seems to have had no windows, but the first story had, in addition to its two windows, a kind of balcony. The roof, above which we can see the trees of the garden behind, was very strange — it was flat, but had a curious oblique construction of boards which perhaps was there to catch the cool north wind and channel it into the upper story of the house. [Source: Adolph Erman, “Life in Ancient Egypt”, 1894]

We see in a Theban wall-picture a country house of the time of the 18th dynasty; it was not represented on account of its special grandeur, but as being the scene of a home-festival. In the open porch before the house are the vessels of wine, while the food is on tables adorned with garlands; numerous jars, loaves, and bowls stand close by, hidden by a curtain from the guests who are entering. Whilst the latter greet their host a jar of wine with its embroidered cover is carried past, and two servants in the background, who seem to be of a very thirsty nature, have already seized some drinking bowls.

The house itself lies in a corner of the garden, which is planted with dark green foliage trees, figs, and pomegranates, and in which there is also an arbour covered with vines. The garden is surrounded by a wall of brownish brick pierced by two granite doors. Though the house has two stories it strikes us as very small; it has only one door which, as was customary at that time, is placed at one side of the principal wall and not in the middle. The ground floor seems to be built of brick and to be whitewashed; it is lighted by three small windows with wooden latticework; the door has a framework of red granite. The first story is in quite a different style, the walls are made of thin boards, the two windows are large, their frames project a little from the wall and arc closed by brightly colored mats. This story contains probably the principal room of the house, the room for family life. A curious fact confirms this supposition: the window-hangings have a small square piece cut out at the bottom allowing the women to see out of the windows without themselves being seen. A similar arrangement exists now in modern Egyptian houses.

The roof of the second story rests on little pillars and is open on all sides to the air. Ventilation is much thought of also in the other parts of the house, for the whole of the narrow front is left open and can only be closed by a large curtain of matting. In our picture this is only half drawn up, so as to conceal the interior of the ground floor from the guests. In order to protect this part of the house from the great heat of the Theban sun, a wonderful canopy, borne by six tliin blue wooden pillars, is carried over the whole building, and brought forward like a porch in the front of the house. Our picture shows us how this porch was used; it was the place in which the Egyptians enjoyed the pleasures of life; here they could breathe the sweet breath of the north wind and enjoy the flowers and trees of the garden.

The above details show plainly that the gentlefolk of Egypt preferred to live far from the bustle of the world; this is still more apparent in the case of another house of the same epoch. The gentleman to whom the garden belonged had his house hidden in the farthest corner of his garden, behind high leafy trees screening it from inquisitive eyes. People passing on the canal would only see the tops of the trees over the white wall: the simplicity of the house corresponds with its hidden situation. It is a one-storied building with a higher wing something like a tower on the left; it has plain wooden walls, the only decoration of which consists in the hollow below the roof and the projecting frames and pillars of the windows. Unfortunately the details of the plan are very obscure.

A country house, such as we have described above, cannot be considered as a complete example of the house of an Egyptian gentleman. It is so small that it would be impossible to find room for a large household. There are no servants' rooms, no storerooms, no kitchens. All these offices, which might be dispensed with in the country, are absolutely necessary in a town house: the number of servants employed in the household of a rich man will alone give us an idea of the size required for his residence.

Houses in Amarna

Ancient Egyptian house scene

The plans of the houses which are given in the tombs of Tell el-Amarna are in fact quite different from the above. Instead of a single building with several stories we here find a number of one-storied rooms and halls grouped round small courts. This characteristic is common to all, though the details of the plans may vary a good deal according to the taste or the wealth of the proprietor. The two houses represented in the tomb of the high priest MeryRa are perhaps the most simple in their arrangement; one is drawn from the front, the other from the side. They seem both to have belonged to that wealthy priest. The new city extended a long way, and it is quite conceivable that he ma} have thought it necessary to have one house near the temple and another near the palace of his master. The two buildings resemble each other very much, and in our description we will treat them as the same. [Source: Adolph Erman, “Life in Ancient Egypt”, 1894]

The ground plan was rectangular, and the whole was surrounded by a wall which could only be entered on the short side in front of the house where there was the principal door with a small door on either hand. Inside the wall was a court where we see the servants busy sweeping and sprinkling with water. The farther wall of this court forms the front of three small buildings. The arrangement of the two side rooms is obscure — we can only see a row of pillars in the interior of them; the central building however certainly served as a vestibule to the great hall which lay behind. This vestibule is a coquettish kiosk borne by four pretty pillars, the wall in front only reaching half way up. The top of this wall and the posts of the doors are adorned with rows of uraeus snakes in bronze. There is a porch in front of the vestibule, like that in the country house mentioned above.

Anna Stevens of Cambridge University wrote: “Tell el-Amarna is the site of the late 18th Dynasty royal city of Akhetaten (Amarna), the most extensively studied settlement from ancient Egypt. It is located on the Nile River around 300 kilometers south of Cairo, almost exactly halfway between the ancient cities of Memphis and Thebes, within what was the 15th Upper Egyptian nome. Founded by the “monotheistic” king Akhenaten in around 1347 B.C. as the cult center for the solar god, the Aten, the city was home to the royal court and a population of some 20,000-50,000 people. It was a virgin foundation, built on land that had neither been occupied by a substantial settlement nor dedicated to another god before. And it was famously short-lived, being largely abandoned shortly after Akhenaten’s death, some 12 years after its foundation [Source: Anna Stevens, Amarna Project, 2016, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2013 escholarship.org ]

Houses at Amarna were built of mud-brick, with fittings in stone and wood. Although no two houses are identical, they show a preference for certain spaces and room arrangements, including a large focal room, often in the center of the building, from which other spaces opened. Most houses preserve a staircase, indicating at least the utilization of rooftops as activity areas, and probably often a second story proper. The elite expressed their status by building larger villas with external courtyards that included substantial mud-brick granaries, and sometimes incorporated ponds and shrines, the latter occasionally yielding fragments of sculpture depicting or naming the royal family. [Source: Anna Stevens, Amarna Project, 2016, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2013 escholarship.org]

“The large expanses of housing exposed at Amarna have allowed for two fundamental observations on urban life and society here. The first is that smaller houses tend to cluster around the larger estates of the city’s officials and master-craftsmen. This arrangement suggests that the occupants of the former supplied goods and services to the owners of the larger residences, who were themselves presumably answerable to the state, in return for supplies such as grain. The second is that the variations in house size, likely to reflect in part differences in status, allow an opportunity to model the socio-economic profile of the city. When the ground-floor areas of Amarna houses are plotted on a graph according to their frequency, the resultant curve suggests a population that was fairly evenly graded in socio-economic terms, without sharp class distinctions . It

Palaces in Ancient Egypt

Amarna Palace

Large private houses, and even the king's palace, had similar plans and differed mainly in size and grandeur. The palace has a vestibule with a principal door and two side doors; three small buildings with a row of pillars extending along the front forms the further side of this vestibule. The central building (answering to the kiosk-like ante-chamber in the house of Meryre') is often represented in the tombs of Tell el Amarna; the king and queen appear on the balcony above, to show themselves to their faithful servants and to throw down presents to them. [Source: Adolph Erman, “Life in Ancient Egypt”, 1894]

The balcony, which is frequently mentioned, forms a characteristic part of the royal palace; the king appeals' on it to inspect the heaps of. tribute below and the slaves who are led before him. This “great balcony “was therefore richly decorated; it consisted of “good gold “or of “lapis lazuli and malachite. " Behind the three antechambers are the state rooms, two immense dining halls, and adjoining one of these is the kitchen and the sleeping apartment of the monarch. In the latter his bedstead stands surrounded by flowers in bloom.

Not far from the temple of Medinet Habu there is a ruin, which is probably the remains of a royal fortress. Ramses II, and Ramses III laid out certain palaces near the temples which they had founded on the western bank. The pleasing building with narrow rooms, like a tower, so well known by the name of the “Pavilion of Medinet Habu," belongs to the noble royal palace, which Ramses III. built here for himself “like the hall of Atum, which is in the heavens, with pillars, beams, and doors of silver, and a great balcony of good gold upon which to appear. “Contrary to custom Ramses III. built the front of his palace of quarried stone, and therefore the ruins of this part remain whilst no trace is left of the palace proper.

Tower Houses of Ancient Egypt

Manuela Lehmann wrote: Egyptian tower houses are a type of dwelling developed in the Third Intermediate Period in Egypt. They were extensively used in the time from the Late Period (26th Dynasty) until Roman times and were still in use through Late Antiquity, Medieval times until modern times. Many of these houses used the so called casemate foundations, a foundation type that was also used for other types of buildings. [Source: Manuela Lehmann, University of Tübingen, Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2021]

Classical authors such as Herodotus and Diodorus mention tower houses in their descriptions of their travels. Herodotus reports in The Histories, in the fifth century B.C. , that in Egypt the inhabitants of tower houses slept on the roofs to escape the mosquitoes. That people used the roofs for sleeping is confirmed in Papyrus Giessen 67 from the first half of the A.D. second century. Diodorus Siculus, writing in the first century B.C. , mentions Egyptian houses of four and five stories in Diospolis Magna (i. e., Thebes). A seven-story building at Hermopolis is mentioned in Papyrus Oxyrhynchus 34, 2719, of the third century CE. Otherwise, legal documents occasionally mention different rooms of houses and their functions. Archaeology and chronological development

A large number of Late Period, Ptolemaic, and Roman tower houses have been excavated, especially in the Nile Delta and Faiyum, although some are also known from the Nile Valley. Particularly in the Delta, levels above the foundations or ground floors are rarely preserved due to the actions of the sebakhin (those who dig up ancient mud brick for use as fertilizer), who removed massive amounts of earth, for use as fertilizer, from archaeological sites in the nineteenth and early twentiethcenturies. The ground plans of the excavated structures are square, rectangular, or L-shaped, paralleling shapes already seen in the house models and which are still seen in tower houses in Yemen today. Archaeology helps elucidate the development of the Egyptian tower house over time. The earliest excavated examples of Egyptian tower houses date to the end of the Third Intermediate Period at el-Ashmunein, where the shift towards houses with much wider walls can be seen in the archaeological stratigraphy.

Ptolemaic tower houses were often built with surrounding annexes, not found in earlier times, containing silos, ovens, or stables. Some of the best-preserved examples of tower houses derive from the Ptolemaic Period and still have upper stories preserved at sites such as Karanis and Tebtunis.

The oldest confirmed traces of tower houses in the Arabian Peninsula date to around 800 B.C. Tower houses are still built today in many countries of the Middle East such as Yemen, Oman, Saudi Arabia, and Morocco, either with mud bricks or with rammed earth (jalus). Numerous variants and local styles are apparent. Some of the modern tower houses are still remarkably similar in some respects to the tower houses of ancient Egypt. This is especially the case in southwestern Saudi Arabia, particular Najran and the region of the Hadramaut in Yemen, where the tower houses of Shibam, Sanaa, and Tarim are located.

Why Tower Houses Were Built in Ancient Egypt

wooden house model

Manuela Lehmann wrote: Various explanations for the appearance of tower houses in Egypt have been offered. One common explanation is that the inundation of the Nile was higher in the Late Period, which resulted in the placement of buildings on a higher platform as protection against the flood and moisture. This reasoning weakens, however, when one considers that historically settlements tended to be built in areas where a normal inundation would not reach the dwellings. Mud brick as a construction material is not water-resistant without further coating. A mud-brick building would not be able to withstand lengthy exposure to water, and the damage to the foundation would result in the building’s collapse. The tower houses in the Nile Valley and the Faiyum were not as adversely affected by the floods as were those in the Delta, and yet they had similar massive foundations. [Source: Manuela Lehmann, University of Tübingen, Institute for Ancient Near Eastern Studies, UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, 2021]

An alternative explanation for the presence of tower houses takes into account the increase in population in the later periods of Egyptian history, especially in the cities, the lack of space perhaps forcing people to build taller houses. This argument rests on three main assumptions: that the tower house was mainly a “city” form; that there was a lack of available space for building; and that land was more expensive in cities. Scholars have often considered buildings with several stories to have been mainly a city phenomenon,with houses in villages being larger and consisting of just one or two stories. This differentiation is difficult to test, however, as complete settlements in Egypt are rarely excavated and upper stories are often not preserved; therefore reconstruction of house and inhabitant numbers are merely speculative. From the Late Period onward it can be shown that tower houses were built in larger and smaller settlements alike.

Lack of space might indeed have been a factor in some places such as the island of Elephantine. seems to have been minimal restriction of space, for example at Aswan and Buto, and also Tell el-Dabaa, where a large area of a formerly abandoned settlement was reoccupied using tower houses. That a higher population led to an increase in prices of land, with some texts indeed showing that the prices in cities were higher than in the countryside, would conceivably have made houses with more stories a popular choice. A further explanation for the development of the tower house in Egypt relates to its potentially defensive nature. From the end of the New Kingdom onward, more and more cities began to have perimeter walls, and dwellings were more often built inside temple enclosures, suggesting a growing need for defence at a time when foreign powers were increasingly conquering Egypt. The compact and massive character of the tower house, combined with the lack of windows in the basement, suggests it was more easily defendable than the tripartite or courtyard house of earlier times. Tower houses were also advantageous for storing larger volumes of goods. It is noteworthy, too, that the defensive aspect of tower houses seems to have played a role in their functionality in modern Yemen. Climatic conditions may constitute an additional potential factor in the development of Egyptian tower houses, as the high rooms are conducive to a more pleasant room-temperature, although dramatic climatic change is not attested in the period in which the houses become popular.

Image Sources: Wikimedia Commons

Text Sources: UCLA Encyclopedia of Egyptology, escholarship.org ; Internet Ancient History Sourcebook: Egypt sourcebooks.fordham.edu ; Tour Egypt, Minnesota State University, Mankato, ethanholman.com; Mark Millmore, discoveringegypt.com discoveringegypt.com; Metropolitan Museum of Art, National Geographic, Smithsonian magazine, New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, Discover magazine, Times of London, Natural History magazine, Archaeology magazine, The New Yorker, BBC, Encyclopædia Britannica, Time, Newsweek, Wikipedia, Reuters, Associated Press, The Guardian, AFP, Lonely Planet Guides, “World Religions” edited by Geoffrey Parrinder (Facts on File Publications, New York); “History of Warfare” by John Keegan (Vintage Books); “History of Art” by H.W. Janson Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, N.J.), Compton’s Encyclopedia and various books and other publications.

Last updated August 2024