Houses Of The Ancient Egyptian Commoners

The soil of Egypt, periodically washed by the inundation, is a black,
compact, homogeneous clay, which becomes of stony hardness when dry. From
immemorial time, the fellahin have used it for the construction of their
houses. The hut of the poorest peasant is a mere rudely-shaped mass of this
clay. A rectangular space, some eight or ten feet in width, by perhaps
sixteen or eighteen feet in length, is enclosed in a wickerwork of palm-
branches, coated on both sides with a layer of mud. As this coating cracks
in the drying the fissures are filled in, and more coats of mud are daubed
on until the walls attain a thickness of from four inches to a foot.
Finally, the whole is roofed over with palm-branches and straw, the top
being covered in with a thin layer of beaten earth. The height varies. In
most huts, the ceiling is so low that to rise suddenly is dangerous both to
one's head and to the structure, while in others the roof is six or seven
feet from the floor. Windows, of course, there are none. Sometimes a hole
is left in the middle of the roof to let the smoke out; but this is a
refinement undreamed of by many.

At the first glance, it is not always easy to distinguish between these
huts of wattle and daub and those built with crude bricks. The ordinary
Egyptian brick is a mere oblong block of mud mixed with chopped straw and a
little sand, and dried in the sun. At a spot where they are about to build,
one man is told off to break up the ground; others carry the clods, and
pile them in a heap, while others again mix them with water, knead the clay
with their feet, and reduce it to a homogeneous paste. This paste, when
sufficiently worked, is pressed by the head workman in moulds made
of hard wood, while an assistant carries away the bricks as fast as they
are shaped, and lays them out in rows at a little distance apart, to dry in
the sun. A careful brickmaker will leave them thus for half a day,
or even for a whole day, after which the bricks are piled in stacks in such
wise that the air can circulate freely among them; and so they remain for a
week or two before they are used. More frequently, however, they are
exposed for only a few hours to the heat of the sun, and the building is
begun while they are yet damp. The mud, however, is so tenacious that,
notwithstanding this carelessness, they are not readily put out of shape.
The outer faces of the bricks become disintegrated by the action of the
weather, but those in the inner part of the wall remain intact, and are
still separable. A good modern workman will easily mould a thousand bricks
a day, and after a week's practice he may turn out 1,200, 1,500, or even
1,800. The ancient workmen, whose appliances in no wise differed from those
of the present day, produced equally satisfactory results. The dimensions
they generally adopted were 8.7 x 4.3 x 5.5 inches for ordinary bricks, or
15.0 x 7.1 x 5.5 for a larger size (Note 3), though both larger and smaller
are often met with in the ruins. Bricks issued from the royal workshops
were sometimes stamped with the cartouches of the reigning monarch; while
those made in private factories bore on the side a trade mark in red ochre,
a squeeze of the moulder's fingers, or the stamp of the maker. By far the
greater number have, however, no distinctive mark. Burnt bricks were not
often used before the Roman period (Note 4), nor tiles, either flat or
curved. Glazed bricks appear to have been the fashion in the Delta. The
finest specimen that I have seen, namely, one in the Gizeh Museum, is
inscribed in black ink with the cartouches of Rameses III. The glaze of
this brick is green, but other fragments are coloured blue, red, yellow, or
white.

The nature of the soil does not allow of deep foundations. It consists of a
thin bed of made earth, which, except in large towns, never reaches any
degree of thickness; below this comes a very dense humus, permeated by
slender veins of sand; and below this again--at the level of infiltration--
comes a bed of mud, more or less soft, according to the season. The native
builders of the present day are content to remove only the made earth, and
lay their foundations on the primeval soil; or, if that lies too deep, they
stop at a yard or so below the surface. The old Egyptians did likewise; and
I have never seen any ancient house of which the foundations were more than
four feet deep. Even this is exceptional, the depth in most cases being not
more than two feet. They very often did not trouble themselves to cut
trenches at all; they merely levelled the space intended to be covered,
and, having probably watered it to settle the soil, they at once laid the
bricks upon the surface. When the house was finished, the scraps of mortar,
the broken bricks, and all the accumulated refuse of the work, made a bed
of eight inches or a foot in depth, and the base of the wall thus buried
served instead of a foundation. When the new house rose on the ruins of an
older one decayed by time or ruined by accident, the builders did not even
take the trouble to raze the old walls to the ground. Levelling the surface
of the ruins, they-built upon them at a level a few feet higher than
before: thus each town stands upon one or several artificial mounds, the
tops of which may occasionally rise to a height of from sixty to eighty
feet above the surrounding country. The Greek historians attributed these
artificial mounds to the wisdom of the kings, and especially to Sesostris,
who, as they supposed, wished to raise the towns above the inundation. Some
modern writers have even described the process, which they explain thus:--A
cellular framework of brick walls, like a huge chess-board, formed the
substructure, the cells being next filled in with earth, and the houses
built upon this immense platform.