Through the Eras

Architecture and Designthat were also a series of rectangles. The archaeologistBarry Kemp has compared the house plans at Kahunwith contemporary models of houses found in tombs.He found that the focus of the house was a central courtyardthat often contained a pool and garden. The wallssurrounding the court were plastered and painted inblack, blue, yellow, and white. A portico at one end ofthe courtyard had wooden columns, also brightlypainted. Even the flat roof of the portico was paintedblue with gold stars on the underside. From the courtyard,it was easy to reach a reception room, the equivalentof an American living room. This room usually hadfour columns supporting the roof. Arranged around thereception room were bedrooms with built-in platformsfor beds in alcoves. Arranged around the bedrooms wereadditional, smaller courtyards that allowed light and airinto them. The house also had workrooms and granariesto store grain. The models show that these workroomsincluded a bakery, brewery, cattle shed, and butcheringarea. These houses provided a lot of space and privacyto the members of the elite class at Kahun.SMALL HOUSES. The small houses contained about120 square meters (1,291 square feet). According to thesurviving texts, the people who lived there were manuallaborers, soldiers, low-level scribes, doorkeepers for thetemple, and singers and dancers of both sexes for thetemple. The houses themselves have no regular plan,though they are all basically rectangular in outline andalso in the internal divisions. The English archaeologistBarry Kemp suggests that the residents remodeled anoriginal standard plan to suit each family’s needs. A seriesof census documents for the town provides a glimpseof who lived in these houses and the function of thesedwellings. The soldier Hori, his wife Shepset, and theirson Sneferu originally occupied one house. At somepoint Shepset’s mother and five sisters joined the household,raising the number of residents from three to nine.By the time Sneferu was an adult, his mother, grandmother,and three aunts lived in the house with him.This fluctuation shows the likelihood that the residentsmade internal adjustments to the plan to accommodatelarger and smaller numbers of people living in them atdifferent times.SOURCESAlexander Badawy, A History of Egyptian Architecture: TheFirst Intermediate Period, the Middle Kingdom, and theSecond Intermediate Period (Berkeley: University of CaliforniaPress, 1966).Barry Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization (Londonand New York: Routledge, 1989).NEW KINGDOM TEMPLESNEW KINGDOM. The New Kingdom (1539–1075B.C.E.) was the period of Egypt’s greatest geographicalextent. At the end of the Middle Kingdom (about 1630B.C.E.), a Semitic-speaking ethnic group ruled the easterndelta, closest to the Sinai Desert and the northernportion of Egypt. Whether a conquest or gradual infiltrationof peoples, this group called the Hyksos (fromthe Egyptian term heka-hasut, meaning “rulers of foreigncountries”) ruled the northern portion of the country.The New Kingdom commenced when a series of princeswho ruled in Thebes in Upper (southern) Egypt drovethe Hyksos out of Egyptian territory. They eventuallyruled a united Egypt and expanded their rule to Syria inthe northwest and well into the modern Sudan in thesouth. Taxes coming from these regions made Egypt therichest country in the Mediterranean world at the timeand led to increased investments in architecture.CLASSIFICATION. Since the nineteenth century,Egyptologists have classified New Kingdom temples aseither a cult temple for a god or a mortuary temple forthe deceased king. The false perception of the god’s templeas a place where the Egyptians celebrated a permanentlyestablished cult and the mortuary temples as aplace to hold a funeral fostered this division. Egyptologistssuch as Gerhard Haeney, Dieter Arnold, andAlexander Badawy recognized that, from an Egyptianperspective, the so-called mortuary temple is a specifickind of permanent cult temple. In the mortuary temple,the deceased king is one of the minor gods worshippedin a cult primarily devoted to Amun, the chief god ofthe Egyptian pantheon during the New Kingdom. Thecult continued in a mortuary temple long beyond theday of the king’s funeral. The architectural plans forgods’ temples and mortuary temples are very similar. Themajor difference between the two stems from the numerousadditions kings made to gods’ temples over longperiods of time. While kings often added to gods’temples—obscuring their original plans—temples thatincluded a deceased king’s cult usually had no major additions.Thus in the following analysis of New Kingdomtemples the royal mortuary temple will be treated as aspecific kind of god’s temple rather than a completelydifferent sort of temple altogether.TYPICAL GOD’S TEMPLE. A god’s temple was hishouse, i.e. his dwelling place. The most common ancientEgyptian words for “temple” were per (house), or hout(mansion, estate). Beginning in the Eighteenth Dynasty(1539–1292 B.C.E.), temple architects developed a standardplan that resembled the three-part plans of ordinaryArts and Humanities Through the Eras: Ancient Egypt (2675 B.C.E.–332 B.C.E.) 45