Town Houses
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City House |
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Villa Pond |
City Houses and Blocks of Flats can be
6 stories high |
City Villas |
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Country estate |
City Houses and Blocks of Flats model
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City Houses and Blocks of Flats model
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Villa Garden and Pond
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Central Room |
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Villa of Merere High priest of
ATON in the city of Ahetaten |
Housing |
The House of Djehutinefer
Djehutinefer was a royal scribe and treasurer
under Amenhotep II. He lived and was buried at Thebes,
where drawings of his townhouse were found. According to
the depiction of its outside it was narrow and tall with
a wide entrance. The walls were painted blue.
He had a second tomb made for himself where a kind
of a cross section of his house was shown.
Djehutinefer's house seems to have been three
storeys high - Egyptians sometimes drew horizontal as
vertical space (things spatially side by side were
depicted as being one above the other, cf. the two
servants occupied with bread-making - bottom right). It
was very spacious compared to the houses of
common people.
The ground floor is given over to the servants,
spinners spinning and three weavers working at two
vertical looms. Further to the right another servant is
grinding corn and someone probably sifting the flour, an
important task as little pieces of rock frequently were
part of the flour.
The second floor is the living area of the family.
In the main hall, the qa'a, the master of the
house sits on a chair placed on a dais. Servants bring
refreshments and flowers. There are four small windows
close to the ceiling, more for ventilation than
lighting.
On the third floor there is a kind of office. Again
the master sits on his raised chair. A servant cools him
with a fan and chases flies away. Another offers him a
drink. Scribes squat in attendance.
On the roof there are grain stores. The food is
mostly prepared and cooked up here and has to be carried
downstairs.
The ceilings of all the rooms are supported by
wooden pillars with three different capitals, simple and
unadorned in the servants' quarters and more elaborate
upstairs.
Not every one had as grandiose a habitation as
Djehutinefer or even his own living space neatly
separated from that of his neighbour. Ownership of land
and rights of access in towns were often shared among a
number of people and were sometimes unclear, leading to
tensions among neighbours. The drawing up of an owner's
rights could prevent future court cases.
You may go up (to) and down (from) the roof on
the stairway of this aforesaid house and you may go
in and out (of the front hallway by means of the)
main doorway of said house and its house path which
goes from the south to the street and (you) may make
any alteration on it (with your workmen) and your
materials in proportion to your aforesaid
one-eighteenth share from today onward forever."
From a bill of sale dated to the
middle of the third cent. BCE,
Oriental Institute, U. of Chicago
 
Reconstruction Model of the house Rannefer in the City
of Tel Amarna |
Villas and Villa of
General Ramose
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General Ramose's House
Below
are roll-overs of the house that give a better
look at the inside of the house and a better
feel of the overall house itself.
The house
itself would have been primarily built of mud
brick and then whitewashed with gypsum. The
inside would have been plastered and decoration
applied on top. (Kemp, 1989, pg. 296)
Another
building material that would have been
restricted to very wealthy people was stone. The
significance of stone being used in the
construction of the house of General Ramose in
the section where I discuss the
Central Room.
Besides being a sign of wealth, the stone in
Ramose's house was the way that Borchadt was
able to identify this house as belonging to the
Vizier Ramose. Usually, in a house of someone so
important, the initial threshold of the entrance
would have been brightly painted and would have
borne the name of the resident in hieroglyphs on
its jambs (Lloyd, 1933, pg.3). In the case of
the house of General Ramose, we can assume that
this was also present in his house, but no
evidence of such a threshold in the entrance
remains today. As can be seen in the picture
below of the low stairs leading to the entrance
of the house.
Picture from Die Wohnhäuser In Tell
El-Amarna, by Ludwig Borchardt and Herbert
Ricke.
However,
there are door jambs from the private part of
the house that bear the name of General Ramose
and his titles. The pictures are below.
The area
of the house is a particular point of interest
because having an internal staircase in a house
meant that there was a second story. According
to Seton Lloyd, in most cases, along with the
appearance of an internal staircase, there have
also been small column bases that had presumably
fallen from above (Lloyd, 1933, pg. 7). No one
is exactly sure what the people of the
residences used the enclosed part of the second
story for, it could quite possibly have been for
more storage space or a private place for the
family to relax inside. The outside part of the
second story, however, was used for sitting,
relaxing, sleeping, or any other activity that
the occupants could have wanted to do out there.
The people that reconstructed
Ramose's house in this model from Cambridge had
a differing opinion than I do about where the
staircase is located. I know from Die
Wohnhäuser In Tell El-Amarna, by Ludwig
Borchardt and Herbert Ricke that the staircase
is located as indicated in the picture below:
With the way that the
Cambridge model has its second story arranged,
there is no way that they were basing their
reconstruction on the floor plans from Die
Wohnhäuser In Tell El-Amarna. The way that I
have constructed the second story of Ramose's
house in my project is based on this floor plan,
which the picture below demonstrates.
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Villa of Vizier Nakht
Villas in Ancient Egypt
Private Housing at Amarna
by Jimmy Dun
Amarna, ancient Akhetaten, is such an anomaly. It was
purposefully destroyed (building material being used elsewhere)
at the end of the
Amarna Period by the ancient Egyptians because of the
Akhenaten
heresy, but because of its location and other lucky
characteristics, certain elements of the city are some of the
best preserved from the
New
Kingdom in Egypt. Hence, rather than obliterating
Akhenaten's memory as they wished to do, the ancient Egyptians
helped it to survive. On the other hand, it is somewhat of a
curse to
Egyptologists, for many elements of the city could not be
called typical. Not only were the temples unique, but because of
the need to expedite its construction, many other aspects of the
city differ from the ancient Egyptian norm as well. Residential
housing, though perhaps providing us with clues as to the
general elements included in
ancient Egyptian homes, was at the same time also atypical
at Amarna. Specifically, the Amarna type of house is remarkably
uniform, even in upper and middle class residences. Here, we
have hundreds of houses that have been excavated and because of
their uniformity, we may derive certain characteristics that
were common to all residences at
Amarna. Outside of the
workers village, the characteristic
Amarna house was essentially a country home on large grounds
and surrounded by a courtyard comprising a garden, a kitchen,
servants' quarters and stables or silos, all within an enclosure
wall. In fact, the typical house at Amarna was more of a mansion
than a town house. The walls were generally made of brick,
supplemented by stone for the bases of columns and even for
doorways. Columns, roofs and staircase supports were of wood,
while floors were made of mud or of brick, that whitewashed and
painted.
Floor plan of an upper class home at Amarna Most of these houses
at
Amarna had a somewhat square plan, oriented parallel to the
river, and consisted of two well defined sections of private and
public living areas.
In the
public area, there was what might have been considered a living
room that developed into a broad hall, sometimes called a
loggia, and a
deep hall or central square hall, to which an entrance vestibule
was added occasionally. Sometimes there were simply two broad
halls. Basically, housing differed for the rich, middle class
and poor in that they had two, one or no broad halls
respectively. A ramp or stairway would also ascend to a
northern lobby, which has been described, though on no
substantial grounds, as a porter's lodge. Adjoining the ramp or
stairway is a broad hall or reception room, sometimes also
called a loggia
on the assumption that it had large windows opening above the
steps and facing the north. We know from
ancient texts,
and from studies of climatic conditions prevailing in later
times and the present as well, that the cool breeze blew from
the north or west, and the arrangement of a reception room open
to the north and west was to take advantage of these
conditions. The central chamber was usually square and opened
upon the loggia.
It forms the nucleus of the house plan and could have also been
used as a living area. This room had higher walls than those
elsewhere in the house, probably allowing for clerestory
lighting just below a ceiling that was supported on wooden
columns, typically painted a reddish brown. Other rooms
surrounded the central chamber providing additional insulation
against the heat of the summer and the cool evenings in winter.
Numerous doorways opened off of this central chamber according
to a strict pattern of symmetry and niches. This consisted of
niches in the shape of doorways set opposite or symmetrical with
the actual doorways. The larger niches would have probably
contained a stela representing the royal family and another with
a prayer to the
Aten
disk. These would have functioned as domestic shrines. Featured
in the chamber as permanent furniture was a raised dais along
the middle of the rear wall that acted as a divan. Cushions and
chairs were placed on this dais for the owners visitors. A
brazier container sunk into the plastered floor, and a
lustration slab were also present, evidencing its use as a
living room. At the tops of the walls, the this room would have
been decorated with a frieze of plants such as water lilies or
perhaps pendent ducks, flowers or festoons of fruit. Doorways
were frequently painted with horizontal stripes of various
colors, while the ceiling would have been a rich blue as in the
house of Nakht. In one of the rooms leading off from the central
chamber, a staircase consisting of two or more flights would
have led to a roof terrace, though in larger mansions a columned
loggia was
built above the broad hall and possibly over other rooms as
well. The private areas within residential houses at
Amarna typically consisted of a square hall, the master's
bedroom, a few smaller rooms and a bathroom and a latrine.
The square hall, which was perhaps the women's quarters,
would typically be similar to the central hall but is smaller,
fitted however, with the same type of furniture. Lighting would
usually be provided by windows opening high on the south wall.
The master's bedroom was the most private of all the rooms, and
was most often situated in the southwest corner of the house. It
was accessible either through the square hall or a lobby. The
bedroom was discernable from the alcove for the bed, which was
somewhat narrower than the room and set in its rear part on a
raised floor. There were small, stone blocks in the shape of a
truncated pyramid that were placed under the feet of the bed.
The alcove was not simply a mater of aesthetics. Because of the
greater thickness of its walls scholars believe that it may have
been roofed over with a vault carried high above the ceiling and
opening on the terrace for ventilation. Representations of the
royal palace all show such a device for the cool northern
breeze. Near the bedroom a group of rooms function as a
bathroom, latrine and robe room or closet. The bathroom would be
fitted with a slightly inclined stone-slab floor and the walls
wee typically lined to a certain height (about half a meter)
with battered stone slabs to protect against dampness and
splashing. Drainage of waste water was provided by setting a
basin beneath the spout of the floor lab in the bathroom, or
sometimes by drainage channels running through the outer wall
into a vessel or straight into the desert sand. Lacking any
water pipes, the bathroom must have been a primitive shower
system where water was poured over the bather by an attendant
from behind the partial wall. Often, only a partial wall some
1.25
meters in height separated the bathroom from the
latrine.
Typical toilet seats at Amarna and elsewhere in ancient Egypt
during the New Kingdom The latrine was a simple earth-closet
equipped with a removable oblong vessel placed under the slit in
a brick or wooden seat. Such devices should be considered as
common throughout Egypt at this time. Likewise, the side rooms
had transverse low walls abutting against the main wall and were
equipped with wooden frames used as shelving for the storage
of linen, just as in temples and palaces at
Thebes.
The granary court in the House of Ranefer at Amarna Many
Amarna homes had outbuildings that were situated according
to a specific layout. Often, there was a main entrance doorway
at an end of the enclosure wall that opened onto a pathway
bordered with trees growing in puddles of
Nile River mud which led to a small chapel. When present,
these chapels were elevated on a
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Lustration slab in one of the smaller
houses (dug in 1924) |
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rectangular socle and accessed by a stairway. Usually,
the chapels had a very small porch and a roofless shrine with an
altar for the
Aten.
From the chapel, the path would make a right turn toward the
house. Behind the house there were typically granaries,
storerooms, a
chariot room and stables, servants' quarters and kitchens.
The granaries were in the form of a truncated silo on a circular
plan, covered with cupolas (dome). These silos were paired, with
a stairway winding up to the aperture through which grain was
poured. There was a square doorway at the bottom to disperse the
grain. The storerooms were deep rectangular contiguous rooms.
The stalls and stables for horses sometimes had an extremely
ingenious device.
They were stone paved where the horses stood, with a built-up
manger and tethering-stones that were bordered by a feeding
passage running behind the manger and accessible from the
outside.
Facade of a private temple at Amarna, now in the Egyptian Museum
Servant housing generally featured a large room with pillars.
The kitchens, which were well equipped with a range of simple
pottery ovens, sometimes had attached living quarters for the
cook. These ovens were cylindrical jars, about one meter high
and open at both top and bottom.
They were thickly coated with mud or brick. There was a
small hole for stoking the fire at the bottom. Flat loaves were
introduced from above. An adjacent room was equipped with racks
for drying and storing loaves, and a cement coated slab for
mixing dough. A well was essential in most mansions. That of
Ra'nefer had a circular shaft in which a stairway descends in
two flights to a ring platform around the well itself. However,
some scholars believe that there were few if any ponds in these
mansions, suggesting that places where ponds have been recorded
were simply from covered over wells. Though many aspects of
Amarna were unique to Egypt, most elements of housing in
this location, even though more uniform then elsewhere, must
have at least for the most part imitated residences elsewhere in
Egypt, and the number of remains do indeed provide us with a
rich source for domestic living not usually found elsewhere in
Egypt
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The central room of one of the smaller
houses (dug in 1924), with single column to support the roof and
a limestone ‘lustration slab’ |
Bathroom in one of the smaller houses (dug
in 1924) |
Bathroom in one of the smaller houses (dug
in 1924) |
