Egyptian Housing
The House
Unlike the great stone monuments that gave Egyptian towns of the New Kingdom their respective "skylines," the private architecture of the period did not survive in any immediately recognizable or intact form. Rich and poor alike seem to have built their houses almost exclusively of sun-dried mud brick. Palm logs served for the columns, the staircase supports, and the ceiling beams, and upper floors and roofs were merely deep layers of puddled mud or mud bricks spread over mats that were stretched across the palm rafters. Without constant maintenance, such fragile structures fell quickly into ruin. On the flood plain, the ruins rapidly disappeared beneath the alluvium, only to be further destroyed by centuries of plowing. On the desert 's edge, they were quickly eroded by wind-blown sand and buried. Nevertheless, rather crisp images of the exteriors and interiors of different types of houses of the New Kingdom can be reconstructed in our imaginations with comparatively little effort due to the variety of evidence that, remarkably, has survived. Apart from the very substantial archaeological data, particularly that recovered from Amarna, that enable us to restore the ground plans and to some extent the interior decoration of late Eighteenth-Dynasty houses. there exist many drawings and paintings on ostraca, in papyri, and on tomb walls, providing vivid views of house exteriors and interiors. Several models of houses that may be contemporary afford three-dimensional impressions of modest homes (cats. 1 and 2), while a number of texts furnish literary descriptions of ideal country estates that seem to codify the characteristics most desired by an Egyptian in the house of his dreams. Although at Thebes proper (see pp. 22) there are no excavated remains of houses datable to the New Kingdom, illustrations of houses belonging to members of the Theban aristocracy appear occasionally on the walls of their tombs. These fall essentially into two categories: the
Unlike the great stone monuments that gave Egyptian towns of the New Kingdom their respective "skylines," the private architecture of the period did not survive in any immediately recognizable or intact form. Rich and poor alike seem to have built their houses almost exclusively of sun-dried mud brick. Palm logs served for the columns, the staircase supports, and the ceiling beams, and upper floors and roofs were merely deep layers of puddled mud or mud bricks spread over mats that were stretched across the palm rafters. Without constant maintenance, such fragile structures fell quickly into ruin. On the flood plain, the ruins rapidly disappeared beneath the alluvium, only to be further destroyed by centuries of plowing. On the desert 's edge, they were quickly eroded by wind-blown sand and buried. Nevertheless, rather crisp images of the exteriors and interiors of different types of houses of the New Kingdom can be reconstructed in our imaginations with comparatively little effort due to the variety of evidence that, remarkably, has survived. Apart from the very substantial archaeological data, particularly that recovered from Amarna, that enable us to restore the ground plans and to some extent the interior decoration of late Eighteenth-Dynasty houses. there exist many drawings and paintings on ostraca, in papyri, and on tomb walls, providing vivid views of house exteriors and interiors. Several models of houses that may be contemporary afford three-dimensional impressions of modest homes (cats. 1 and 2), while a number of texts furnish literary descriptions of ideal country estates that seem to codify the characteristics most desired by an Egyptian in the house of his dreams. Although at Thebes proper (see pp. 22) there are no excavated remains of houses datable to the New Kingdom, illustrations of houses belonging to members of the Theban aristocracy appear occasionally on the walls of their tombs. These fall essentially into two categories: the
Bibliography: Ruffle 1977, p. 141, fig. 108. Literature: Reisner 1923b, pp. 229ft., Hermann ~In the context of this catalogue, the term "Bes-image" denotes a visual form common to a number of gods, the most familiar of which is Bes. 1932; Fischer 1980b, cols. 686-693 75