s often made
of stone. The doorposts projected slightly beyond the surface of the wall,
and the lintel supported a painted or sculptured cornice. Having crossed
the threshold, one passed successively through two dimly-lighted entrance
chambers, the second of which opened into the central court (fig. 7). The
best rooms in the houses of wealthier citizens were sometimes lighted
through a square opening in the centre of a ceiling supported on wooden
columns. In the Twelfth Dynasty town of Kahun the shafts of these columns
rested upon round stone bases; they were octagonal, and about ten inches in
diameter (fig. 8). Notwithstanding the prevalence of enteric disease and
ophthalmia, the family crowded together into one or two rooms during the
winter, and slept out on the roof under the shelter of mosquito nets in
summer. On the roof also the women gossiped and cooked. The ground floor
included both store-rooms, barns, and stables. Private granaries were
generally in pairs (see fig. 11), brick-built in the same long conical
shape as the state granaries, and carefully plastered with mud inside and
out. Neither did the people of a house forget to find or to make hiding
places in the walls or floors of their home, where they could secrete their
household treasures--such as nuggets of gold and silver, precious stones,
and jewellery for men and women--from thieves and tax-collectors alike.
Wherever the upper floors still remain standing, they reproduce the ground-
floor plan with scarcely any differences. These upper rooms were reached by
an outside staircase, steep and narrow, and divided at short intervals by
small square landings. The rooms were oblong, and were lighted only from
the doorway; when it was decided to open windows on the street, they were
mere air-holes near the ceiling, pierced without regularity or symmetry,
fitted with a lattice of wooden cross bars, and secured by wooden shutters.
The floors were bricked or paved, or consisted still more frequently of
merely a layer of rammed earth. The rooms were not left undecorated; the
mud-plaster of the walls, generally in its native grey, although
whitewashed in some cases, was painted with red or yellow, and ornamented
with drawings of interior and exterior views of a house, and of household
vessels and eatables (fig. 10). The roof was flat, and made probably, as at
the present day, of closely laid rows of palm-branches covered with a
coating of mud thick enough to withstan