Town Planning in Pharaonic Egypt

Author(s): H. W. Fairman
Source: The Town Planning Review, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Apr., 1949), pp. 32-51
Published by: Liverpool University Press
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32

TOWN

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PHARAONIC

EGYPT

Fig. I- BLOCK PLAN OF TELL EL AMARNA

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april

TOWN
IN

PLANNING

PHARAONIC

EGYPT1

by H. W. FAIRMAN
Brunner Professor of Egyptology, The University of Liverpool

of the towns and cities of Ancient Egypt have disappeared for

ever, engulfed under the rising alluvium, buried under the dwellings
of succeeding ages, or ruthlessly swept away by the natives who
find in ancient bricks and remains a useful source of fertiliser. Thus, apart
from a few actual models of houses and reliefs in tombs, our sole sources of
information are the ruins of the city of Akhetaten, the modern Tell el Amarna,
a few workmen's villages, and a number of fortresses in Egypt and Nubia.
It must be realised at the outset that the survival of the ancient towns
and their siting have been governed fundamentally by two factors- the nature
of the building materials, and the physical condition of the country. The
traditional Egyptian view of the house was of something essentially transient
and impermanent, and this, coupled with the fact that generally speaking
mud brick was cheaper and easier to obtain than stone, meant that all dwellings,
whether the houses of private individuals or the palaces of kings, were always
built of sun-dried mud brick (baked bricks do not occur, except by accident,
before Roman times). Stone was only used as the main constructional material
of permanent buildings- temples and certain types of tombs. Houses and
palaces were built of brick, stone being confined to thresholds, jambs,
lintels and column-bases, and wood being employed only for doors, columns
and roofing beams. Such houses must naturally have had a very limited life,
heavy rains and the mere passage of time must have necessitated frequent
rebuilding. Moreover, timber and stone being scarce and valuable, the moment
a house or town was abandoned, even temporarily, these scarce materials
would be torn out and re-employed elsewhere, thus accelerating the collapse
and disappearance of the buildings.
The position of towns and settlements was governed to a very large extent
the
by
over-riding need to use every possible inch of the precious alluvial soil.
Naturally political, strategic and other considerations must have caused a
i I am much obliged to the Egypt Exploration Society for their generous permission to use material,
much of it unpublished, from their excavations at Tell el Amarna, and in particular for permission to
use Pis. I and II from the late J. D. S. Pendlebury's City of AkbenatenIII (now in the press) from which
figs. 5 and 15 illustrating this paper have been adapted. I am most grateful to Mr. R. E. M. McCaughan
for preparing the drawings and plans.

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34 TOWN

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number of towns to be founded on the cultivable land, but wherever possible

settlements would arise on the desert edge. With the steady rise in the level
of the floor of the Nile valley many of these settlements are now buried under
the alluvium. Many other places, however, were continuously occupied,
new houses and towns being built on the ruins of the old ones, and thus veritable
town mounds arose. Manya modern Egyptiantown and village must be built
on the ruins of an ancient Egyptiansettlement. Space, therefore, must always
have been a problem in the average ancient town, there must have been
relatively little chance of outward expansion and, even if there were not
other evidence, one would be justified in assumingthat a solution had to be
sought upwards. The problem must have been particularlyacute in the Delta
with its swamps, and there is a markedliterary tradition of urbandevelopment
in the Delta, the texts contrasting the inhabited town mounds of the Delta
with the villages of Upper Egypt.
The earliest dwellingsin Egypthavebeen found in a numberof Predynastic2
settlements along the present desert edge. They were roughly circular or
oval in shape and apparentlywere little more than hoops or screens of reeds
or mats, often daubedwith mud. At Merimdein the N.W. Delta and El Omari
near Heluan huts have been found consisting of shallow pits lined with mats
stretched between thin poles, the mats projecting a small but unknown
distanceabove the surface. Whereasin Upper Egyptsettlements and cemeteries
were alwaysseparate,at Merimdeand El Omari burialswere found either under
the floors of huts or just outside them. This confronts us with the very old
Egyptianidea of the grave as a house or home, and it is to be noted that in
early Egypt house and tomb design kept step. The earliest graves and huts
were circular or oval, but in NegadaII, when bricks were introduced, we find
rectangularhouses and tombs. A clay model of this period shows a small
rectangularhouse with flat roof, perhapssurmountedwith a parapet, and with
four small windows, two each set high in opposite walls, and a door placed
to one side of the axis.2A
The settlement at Merimde occupied an area of at least 600x400 yards
and in one part some of the huts are arrangedin two definite rows with a lane
between3. This would seem to hint at some sort of social order or discipline
and an elementary idea of town planning. This fact and the existence of a
large late predynastic settlement over a mile long at Maadi near Cairo has
2 Predynastic cultures in order of age are Tasian, Badarian, Negada I and Negada II. Merimde,
hitherto assumed to be contemporary with or slightly earlier than Tasian, has been suggested in a recent
study to be Negada II : the matter is quite undecided. Tasian is unlikely to be much less than 4,000 b.c.
The main historic periods are : Proto-dynastic (Dyns. I, II), 3,000-2,780 b.c. ; Old Kingdom (Dyns.
Ill- VI), 2,780-2,254 b.c. ; Middle Kingdom (mid-Dyn.XI, Dyn. XII) 2,052-1779 b.c. ; New Kingdom
(Dyns. XVIII-XX) 1553-1085 B.C. ; Late Period (Dyns. XXI-XXXI),
1085-332 b.c. ; Ptolemaic
(332-32 b.c).
2a Maciver and Mace, JB/ Amrah and Abydosy pl. x ; Baldwin Smith, JUgyptian Architecture as Cultural
Expression, pl. iii, 14.
3 Junker, Vorlaufiger Bericbt uber die . . . Grabung auf der neolithischen Siedlung von Merimde-Benisalame

von 2 Jan. bis 20 Feb. 1933 (Vienna 1933), pp. 57-64 and fig. on p. 59.

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1949

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caused it to be assumed that the Delta led in urban development and that the settlements of Lower Egypt were bigger
than those of Upper Egypt. Quite apart from the fact that
the precise date of Merimde is uncertain, there is little solid
fact to support this assumption. In Upper Egypt the
predynastic town at Hierakonpolis, which has not been
excavated, is said to cover an area of at least three quarters Fig.2 HIEROGLYPH
of a mile by a quarter of a mile and to be Negada I in date, OF "CITY." After
Griffith, Hieroglyphs,
with a possibility of a Badarian occupation4, and at Negada No.
142.
itself, the most important predynastic site in Egypt, the
town or the Negada 11 period was surrounded with a brick wall and there
may well have been an earlier town. The evidence is such as not to give
priority to either Upper or Lower Egypt.
What was the form of the earliest Egyptian towns ? It is natural to suppose
that they were protected by some sort of a palisade, but no such defence has
yet been recorded in any early predynastic settlement. It is certain, however,
that during Negada II towns with brick enclosure walls were in existence.
Fragments of a model found at Diospolis show two men looking over a low wall,5
and on slate palettes of late predynastic and early dynastic times towns are
shown as circles or ovals surrounded by stout walls, obviously of brick, and
often provided with buttresses.6
The fact that so many of these early representations show roughly circular
or oval towns is apparently not a coincidence. The early towns at Hierakonpolis7
and El Kab8both seem to have been oval or circular. The normal hieroglyphic
*
*
'
city shows a circular enclosure
word-sign or determinative of town,'
divided into four parts by two intersecting roads (Fig. 2). Although the example
in Fig. 2 is from the Middle Kingdom, the sign already has the same form in
inscriptions of the First Dynasty.9 It seems difficult to believe that the
Egyptians should have used this sign and none other from the beginning of
writing if it did not represent something that really existed.
Hardly any Old Kingdom houses have been excavated. A few modest
houses of the Third Dynasty found at Hierakonpolis mainly appear to be composed of one small room and an even smaller courtyard.10 That there were
larger and more pretentious houses is to be deduced from mastaba-graves of the
Second Dynasty which are clearly modelled on houses and show a varying
number of rooms, which include a latrine and a ' bathroom, 'n Tomb
reliefs of the late Old Kingdom show that better class houses lay in extensive
4 Brunton, The PredynasticTown-siteat Hierakonpolisin GriffithStudies, 272-6.
5 Petrie, Diospolis, pl. vi ; Capart, PrimitiveArt in Egypt, fig. 160 on p. 202.
6 cf. Capart, op, cit. figs. 176, 182, 184 ; Emery, Hemaka,figs. 21, 23 on p. 63.
7 Quibell and Green, HierakonpolisII, pls. lxxii, lxxiii.
&Journal of Egyptian Archaeology, 7, pl. x.
9 Petrie, Royal Tombs, II, pl. v, 1.
10 Quibell and Green, Hierakonpolis,II, pl. lxviii; Annales du Service8, 135.
11 Quibell, Archaic Mastabas, pp. 11, 12, 29 and pls. xxx, xxxi, 2, 3.

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36

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grounds, with domestic offices and stock-yards, and that the houses themselves often had pillared porticoes, and rooms with columns.
If we can trust the evidence of the Pyramid cemeteries, the towns of the
Old Kingdom, or at least those near the Court, were well and carefully planned.
would seek houses close to the palace, so in death
Just as in life the courtiers
' houses of
desired
their
eternity/ their tombs, to be near the resting
they
be
of
their
This
can
seen most clearly at Gizeh where a veritable
lord.
place
of
the
dead
exists
around
the
pyramids.12 In the centre is the pyramid
city
and around in neat and orderly rows, in streets and cross-streets are the
mastabas of the nobles, sometimes having the external appearance of houses,
and grouped and graded, moreover, according to the rank of their owners.
It is hard to escape the conclusion that these pyramid cities do reflect to a
certain extent the lay-out of the capital, though possibly the plan is an ideal
one and the reality may not have been quite so orderly.
All this is necessarily vague and inconclusive. Only at Tell el Amarna have
an ancient city and its ground plan survived, and it is only then that we can speak
with certainty. At the end of the XVIIIth Dynasty the Pharaoh Akhenaten
instituted a religious reform, but apparently finding it difficult to make headway
at Thebes, he built a new capital on a virgin site and moved there between
*
the fifth and sixth years of his reign. In this new city, called Akhetaten, The
Horizon of the Disk/ he spent the remainder of his reign of seventeen years.
Between two and four years after Akhenaten fs death, his successor Tutankhamun
returned to Thebes and the old faith, Amarna was abandoned and never occupied
again. Thus the city was only inhabited for some fourteen or sixteen years
(approximately 1369-1 354 B.C.).
Amarna lies approximately half way between Cairo and Luxor. The city
was built on the east bank of the river at a spot where the cliffs recede to form
a huge semi-circle some seven miles long and two and a half to three miles wide.
To north and south the cliffs come almost to the water's edge, so that the site
was completely shut off from the world. This explains the fact that there is
no city wall, the desert cliffs were the walls* This bay was apparently complete
desert and was therefore devoted to the city only, while tombs for some of
the nobles were cut in the cliffs to north and south of a large valley or wadi
at the end of which, several miles back from the river, it was apparently intended
to make tombs for the royal family. Inscriptions carved in the cliffs on both sides
of the river not only mark the limits and state the exact area of the city, they
also state specifically that Akhetaten included all the land on both sides of the
river from cliff to cliff and stela to stela. It would appear that while the actual
city was built in the desert bay on the east bank, the wide, fertile lands on the
west bank were set apart to keep it supplied with food.
Within this setting, the actual framework of the city is simple, and is formed
by three roads which run from south to north of the built-up area, roughly
12 An instructive plan in Selim Hassan, Gi%a77, second frontispiece; Reisner, A History of the Givyt
Necropolis, Vol. 1, Map 1.

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parallel with the river and each other (Fig. 1). These roads have been called by
the excavators Royal Road (the road nearest the river), West Road (known in
the south as High Priest Street) and East Road. Between Royal Road and the
river, and probably with a frontage on the latter, were built a number of palaces
and state buildings, from south to north Maruaten, a sort of pleasure palace,
the River Temple, the immense Official Palace, the North Palace and its socalled ' zoological garden/ and in the north yet another palace. It is very
likely that other official buildings may also have been built along the riverside,
but if so they have now disappeared under the modern cultivation.
The city that was built around these three main roads falls into several
well-defined sectors (Fig. 1). To the south lies the South City, divided by a
shallow wadi. This was one of the first parts of the city to be built, its development was probably complete by the time the city was abandoned. It was
primarily the quarter of the leading officials and courtiers ; here were the homes
of the Vizir, the High Priest of the Aten and other important persons. There
were, of course, many other humbler homes, and apparently an industrial
centre, for north of the wadi lies the sculptor's workshop in which the famous
Nefertiti head was found, and also, further north near the Palace, a glass
manufactory. To the north of the South City lies the Central City with the
Palace, Temple and government offices, a very carefully planned unit which
will be discussed below. About 800 yards north of the Central City is the
North Suburb, divided by another wadi. It contains a few good houses, but it
is essentially a middle-class, business area and contains two very bad areas of
slums with wretched houses, often little better than hovels, crowded together.
The district immediately to the south of the wadi appears to have been the quarter
of merchants and traders and it is not impossible that the main * quays ' of
the city were situated at the river end of the wadi. The occupation of this
quarter began towards the middle of the reign and it was being actively developed
when Amarna was abandoned. At the extreme north is the North City. It is
the smallest sector and has not been completely excavated nor has it been fully
published. Its history is therefore still uncertain, but there is reason to suppose
that it belongs to the last half of Akhenaten's reign. The very big buildings
near the palace in this sector seem to have been official quarters rather than
homes. At the north end of this suburb, where the cliffs approach the river,
a terraced building is believed to be a custom's house or guard post; a similar
guard post is believed to exist at the extreme south. Finally, tucked away
out of sight and sound in a fold of hills between the cliffs and the South City
is the Workmen's Village, which will be discussed below (p. 43).
This is not the place to discuss the housing in detail, but the plan (Fig. 3)
and the photograph of a model (Fig. 13) speak for themselves. The average
house of the leading notables was a well-planned, bungalow type of building,
standing in its own grounds. The house is roughly square in plan, usually oriented
to the north or west in order to take advantage of the cool winds. The house
is entirely occupied by the apartments of the owner and his family, the kitchen,

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Fig. 3- PLAN AND SECTION OF AN AMARNA HOUSE

After Journal of Egyptian Archaeology,

XIX, fig. 3

servants' quarters, stables etc., being separate and normally placed down-wind
to south or east. The central feature is a large, square room, usually with two
or four columns, and with roof higher than the rest of the house to permit
clerestory lighting: this main room was thus insulated against summer heat
and winter cold. The central hall was reached through another pillared hall
on its north or west, out of which led, sometimes, a cloak room, and a porch
approached by a shallow flight of steps. Behind the central room, lay an inner
hall, (often called, on insufficient grounds, the women's room) from which
one reached the family apartments, and the master's suite of rooms normally
comprising bedroom, bath room and latrine. There was usually another self-

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Fig. 4- DETAIL OF A ROYAL PROGRESS

From Davies,

Rock Tombs of El Amarna IV, pl. xxii

contained set of rooms, apparently for visitors. Stairs led to the roof where
there was a large, airy veranda room on the north or west. The house and its
grounds was surrounded by a good brick wall. In the grounds were a garden,
trees planted in pits dug in the desert and filled with Nile mud, sometimes an
ornamental pond, a private chapel,. and servants' quarters and stores, including
well, bee-hive shaped granaries, kitchen, stables etc.
Thus far we gain an impression of careful town-planning. With the exception
of the Central City, this impression is rather superficial. It is true that the three
main south to north thoroughfares determined the general shape of the city,
and that the side streets were frequently at right angles to the main roads, but
there were no defined blocks or insulae, no standardised sizes of estates. What
appears to have happened is that the wealthiest people selected their own house
sites and built along the main streets, to whose line in general they adhered.
Less wealthy people then built in vacant spaces behind the houses of the rich,
and finally the houses of the poor were squeezed in, with little attempt at order,
wherever space could be found. Thus houses of all types were found in a single
quarter, and though there are marked slum areas, it is evident that there was
no zoning.
The streets were not surfaced, the desert surface was merely scraped and
large rocks and pebbles removed. There was no system of drainage and little
proper sanitation- bathrooms for instance merely drained into the sub-soil.
All the rubbish and refuse was tipped into pits and heaps beyond the existing
limit of the houses. As the city grew these rubbish heaps were levelled, pits
would be filled up and even * disinfected J and the new estates and houses
would be laid out above them. The North Suburb is particularly instructive

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Fig. 5- RECONSTRUCTION OF PART OF THE CENTRAL CITY

Adapted

by permission of the Egypt Exploration

from City of Akhenaten III, pl. ii

Society,

in this respect, for it was still being developed northwards when the city was
abandoned. Here we can see every stage of building: levelled dumps; here a
pit disinfected by burning; here a house almost finished, even the internal
decoration has been completed, only the stone lintel lies beside the front door
ready to be hoisted into position ; here is a house half-finished and here are the
desirable building sites laid out by some enterprising contractor, estates as yet
unbuilt with merely the lower courses of the enclosure wall or only the walltrench to be seen.
In contrast with this picture of rather haphazard planning, there can be
no doubt that the Central City was carefully and deliberately planned as a unit

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hint that this part of the city bore a special name: - ' The
(Fig. 1$). Inscriptions
"
Aten distinguished in Jubilees".'
The western boundary
Island' (called)
is formed by the immense Official Palace, more than half of which is lost under
the cultivation, with a frontage on Royal Road, which at this point is very wide
to allow full scope for royal processions and pageantry (Fig. 4). The northern
boundary is formed by the Great Temple, set in an enclosure over 800 yards
long and 2^0 yards wide. Opposite the south end of the Palace is the Royal
Estate consisting of the Chapel Royal, the Private Palace, containing the king's
private apartments, a garden and stores, and to the south a block of storerooms
and rooms of priests attached to the Chapel Royal. The private and official
portions of the palace are linked by a bridge of three spans crossing Royal
Road: over the central span of the bridge was a small room in which the King
would show himself to the populace and from which he would bestow rewards
on his faithful courtiers (Fig. g). Between the Royal Estate and the Great Temple
were two distinct groups of storerooms, and rooms for the preparation of food:
the southern group apparently served the Palace, and the northern group was
attached to the Temple.
To the east of these buildings lay the government offices. Most of these
cannot be assigned to any department but some have been identified by inscriptions. In this group, for instance, lay the Records Office or Foreign Office
where the famous Amarna Letters, the diplomatic correspondence of the time,
were found. Behind the Records Office lay the House of Life, a building often
'
called i the University but which in fact seems to have been a combination
of school and scriptorium. To the east of
these again lay other buildings which may
have been a kind of Office of Works, consisting of a number of separate departments
each devoted to the interests of a certain
section of the official buildings. To the south
of all these were long rows of rooms, the
offices, obviously, of clerks and civil
servants. Finally, at the desert edge to the
east of all these lay the military barracks and
police quarters, the latter with long rows of
stables, ideally situated so that at any alarm
the * Flying Squad ' could hasten over the
flat desert to the danger point.
Such very briefly is the picture that
can be drawn of the only complete city of
Pharaonic Egypt that is known to us. It is
natural to ask to what extent Amarna was
typical of the other cities of its time. Since
none of these cities have survived, we are Fig. 6. DRAWING OF AN ANCIENT
MODEL OF A TOWN-HOUSE. After
reduced to guesswork, but it is more than Revue d* Egyptologie III, Fig. 3

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Fig. 7- INTERIOR OF A TOWN

After Davies,

EGYPT

april

HOUSE

Town House in Ancient Egypt, Fig. la and b

doubtful whether Amarnawas typical. By this it is not implied that there was
anythingunique in Amarnahousing,for it is clear that the Amarnahouse was fully
in keeping with tradition, and other houses of the same general type have been
foundelsewhere in Egyptand the Sudan. It must be rememberedthat as Amarna
was built in virgin desert, there was ample room for expansion. Suchconditions
did not obtain at Thebes or Memphisand there is evidence that in such cities,
the Amarnabungalow type being impracticable, the houses of the wealthy
were composed of several storeys. Fundamentallythese town houses are the
same as Amarna houses, with the difference that in the former units were
placed one on top of the other that in the latter could be spread over a wide
area. Fig. 6 is a drawingof an ancient model of such a town house, and can be
compared with Fig. 7, a painting from a Theban tomb showing the interior
of a similar house. It will be seen that the kitchens, work rooms and servants'
quarters are on the ground floor, the upper floors contain the living rooms,
and on the roof are small grain bins and other stores. The model hints that the
kitchen etc. were in a semi-basement;while this may have been so, I feel that

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some caution is necessary, for such rooms would have been excessively damp,
if not actually Hooded, during the inundation season. It is interesting to record
that this type of house is not peculiar to the New Kingdom: a model found
in the tomb of a XHth Dynasty notable of El Bersheh shows a house of three
*
'14 of the same
storeys13, and other models and the soul-houses
period prove
the existence of primitive shelters, bungalow-houses and town houses with
several storeys. It can safely be assumed that the average city was walled and that
it contained a proportion of this type of town-house. In later times when the
city population seems to have increased, there is evidence of the block system
of building and the existence of tall tenement houses, but in the New Kingdom
'
a ' town house was apparently occupied by one family only.
Another sidelight on Egyptian town-planning is afforded by the workmen's
villages. Let it be said at the outset that the discovery of such villages is not
to be interpreted as evidence of the existence of a social conscience in Egypt.
They were constructed in order to meet the need to house and keep under due
control numbers of men required in various large enterprises. They are always
found isolated from the rest of the world, and, being built officially for a definite
purpose, they tend to be geometrically planned. The earliest example of such
workers' accommodation is found around the pyramid of Khephren at Gizeh,
but this is not so much a town as a series of barracks: there were originally,
it seems, 1 1 1 long rooms, totally devoid of any fittings, each holding on an
average $o men.15
A different picture is presented by the village of Kahun, erected in connection with the construction of the pyramid of Sesostris II (1897-1879 B.C.)
of the XIIth Dynasty. Unfortunately only a portion of the town has been cleared
(Fig. 8), but it appears that a walled enclosure, probably originally square,
was divided into two unequal parts. In the larger part are the dwellings of the
senior officials, nine or ten very large houses being found at the north end of
the town, a large building at the north west corner which was probably the
governor's palace, and possibly the more modest houses of lesser officials.
The large houses are exceedingly complicated and are in four sections: - the
master's apartments approached through an open court, this section being
oriented to face north; a harem block; domestic quarters and kitchen; and a
large series of offices, stores and perhaps visitors' room. One of these large
houses occupies an area required by some twenty-five of the houses of the
workers in the smaller part of the town. Of the workers houses, all that need
be said is that they were small and crowded together back to back in at least
eleven streets.
There can be no doubt that the planning of the Kahun town was deliberate.
Much the same general picture is provided by the workers' village at Amarna
13 Annales du Service
\ 2, 31 ; Baldwin Smith, op. cit.ypl. lxvi, 3.
14 e.g. Petrie, Gi^ehand RJfeb,pls. xv-xxii.
i5 Petrie, Pyramidsand Templesof Gi%ehy
p. 101 ; Holscher, Das Grabdenkmaldes KbnigsChepbren,
(Leipzig 1912), 36, 70 and Taf. ii.

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(Fig. 9, and see above p. 37). This small, square village was completely
hidden from the city. Like Kahun it is divided into two unequal sections,
but unlike Kahun this division does not seem to have been in order to separate
different classes, for all the houses are alike, except for the commandant's

Fig. 8- PLAN OF THE WORKERS1 VILLAGE AT KAHUN

After Petrie,

Illahun, Kahun and Gurob, pl. xiv

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Fjg. 9- PLAN OF THE WORKERS' VILLAGE AT AMARNA

After Peet-Woolley,

City of Akhenaten I, pl. xvi

house in the southwest corner. The village is composed of five north to south
streets. In the smaller section, all houses open on to the single street, their
doors, however, being placed so that no house looked directly into its opposite
number. In the larger section, all houses opened uniformly to the west. The
houses had four rooms, an outer hall, inner living room with a column, and at
the back a bedroom and a kitchen with stairs leading to the roof. Some houses
contained mangers, which indicates that the occupants kept their cattle in the

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Fig. 10- PLAN OF THE WORKERS' VILLAGE AT DEIR EL MEDINEH:

EARLY XVIIIth DYN.
After Bruyere,

Fouilles de Deir el Medineh (1934-35),

pl. v

house. It is to be noted that there was no internal water supply, and all water
would have had to be brought from the river some miles away. The inhabitants
of the village were the men engaged in making the tombs of the nobles to north
and south of the village. Although their houses are better than the slum quarters
in the main city, the fact that the villagers were apparently shut in and guarded
by night would seem to indicate that they were unruly and probably forced
labour.
The most fascinating, however, of all Egyptian workers' villages is that
of Deir el Medineh on the west bank at Luxor. Here, in a lonely and arid valley
shut in between Gurnet Murai and the southern outliers of the Theban hills,
a village was built in the reign of Tuthmosis I (circa. i28-ii2 B.C.) and
remained in continuous occupation for some 400 years (Fig. 14). Tuthmosis I
was the first king to be buried in the Valley of the Kings and this village was
made to house the men engaged in making and decorating the royal tombs.
The walk over the hills from Deir el Medineh to the Valley takes about half
an hour and hence it was the custom for the men not to return to their homes
daily but to sleep in rough stone hovels erected at the point where the path
dips down into the Valley of the Kings and to return home only at the end of
each 10-day period. The not inconsiderable proportion of foreign names hints
at some element of compulsion in their recruitment, but many of the men
were men of substance and ability and cannot be considered as slaves whatever
the conditions of their work.
The first village was built against Gurnet Murai. It was surrounded by a
stout brick wall, and had a single street or lane which followed the line of the

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old path through the valley. The houses, long and narrow, opened on to this
lane (Fig. 10). Outside the walls were the usual rubbish heaps and the tombs
of the early occupants. As the village expanded, partly by extending the enclosure
wall, partly by erecting houses outside it, the rubbish heaps and early tombs
were levelled and built over (Figs. 1 ia and b).
Eventually the enclosure wall
ceased to be either a defence or a constraint and seems largely to have
distinguished classes among the villagers. It appears that eventually the enclosed
village came to be occupied by the aristocracy, primarily the descendants of
the original occupants, while the houses outside the wall were those of lesser
people, thus while animals were never kept within houses inside the enclosed
village, houses outside the wall often had animals. At the height of the prosperity
of the village there were 70 houses within the enclosure and about go outside.

Figs. I la and b
VILLAGE OF DEIR EL MEDINEH: (a) late xviiith Dyn.; (b) xixth, xxth Dyns.
(a) After Bruyere, op. cit., pl. vi; (b) After Bruyere, op. cit., pl. vii
D

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Since all houses were joined to their fellows and space was limited, the
houses were long and narrow and would not have been lighted except by the
street door and ventilators in the roof. The typical house (Fig. 12) consisted
of an outer hall, an inner room with column and divan, a bedroom, and a
kitchen, usually unroofed, with stairs leading to the roof. There was no well
or water supply in the village and since the nearest source of water was over a
mile away special fatigue parties were detailed to fetch water on donkeys.

Fig. 12
RECONSTRUCTED SECTION AND PLAN OF A TYPICAL DEIR EL MEDINEH HOUSE
After Bruyere,

op. at. fig. 15 on p. 50

This water was poured into a tank outside the main gate, where it was watched
by a special guard, and from here the women would draw water and keep it
in large pots at the entrance to their houses.
A remarkable point about the village is that in spite of 400 years of occupation, the floor level of the village was never raised and houses when rebuilt
were erected on the same foundations . This is surprising and hints at some degree

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Plate 5

Fig. 13- MODEL OF AN AMARNA HOUSE

Photograph by courtesy of the Egyptian Exploration Society

Fig. 14- WORKERS' VILLAGE AT DEIR EL MEDINEH, FROM THE NORTH

After Bruyere, Fouilles de Deir el Medineh (1934-35), pl. iii

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Fig. 15- TELL EL AMARNA

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of control over building and planning. In fact, two ostraca do suggest that
choice of a dwelling may not have been entirely free and that there was a
periodical inspection of the village. Lastly, to complete the picture of this
village, mention must be made of the tombs which eventuallycovered all the
cliflfto the west of the village, the numerousvotive chapels erected just to the
north, and police posts built at either end of the valley.
Our last source of informationon town-planningis provided by Egyptian
fortresses. Space will only permit of the briefest account. The earlier type
was not necessarilyregular in shape; particularlyin the Sudan, the fort would
be sited at a strategic place and in shape would conform to the configuration
of the ground, long defensive arms being built out to cover vulnerablepoints.
Inside the fortress there would be one or two main roads, alwaysa temple,
and houses were neatly and geometricallyarrangedon either side of the streets
(Fig. 16). The town walls were of brick, on a stone foundation, outside they
were protected by a dry moat with a bridge leading to the heavily defended
gate. Usuallya wide space was preservedbetween the outer wall and the houses
to allow troops to manoeuvre and to move about rapidly. Since there was
'
J
normally no internal water supply, a water gate or covered passage was
alwaysbuilt down to the river so that underall conditionswater might be drawn
in safety. Later, after the pacificationof Nubia, new fortresses continued to
be built, though need for them had practically vanished. Since strategic
considerations were no longer paramount, these later fortresses are always
neatly square or rectangular,with unnecessarybuttresses at regular intervals)
and with a generallygeometrical lay-out of the buildings.
It can hardlybe denied, I think,
that there was some form of town
planning in Egypt from very early
times. In workers' villages and in
fortresses, all of which would be
built by the governmentfor specific
purposes, planning originally was
systematicand carefuland there was
strict control over both buildings
and their occupants. The evidence
about cities is less clear, but my
personalfeeling is that while there
was probably in the first place a
rough general groundplan, building
and development within that framework was not really controlled but
was haphazard,and whatever planning there was would tend to deteriorate as time progressed. Though Fig. 16. PLAN OF THE FORTRESS OF SEMNEH
After Bulletin of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts
there was naturally some form of
xxiii, fig. on p. 22

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municipal organisation, we have no evidence of any control over building or

zoning, and no hint of any municipal services of a modern type, though
scavengers and watermen there must have been.
The last words raise the question of the legal side of town planning.
Unfortunately, in the main periods of history there is not a single document
with any bearing on building and planning. In late times there is a considerable
literature in Demotic concerned with housing, but these documents are mainly
legal contracts between individuals and do not refer to any legislation. It is
of interest to note, however, that it is in these documents that we encounter
for the first time direct reference to the use of a party wall and ' ancient
lights/
A demotic papyrus in the British Museum16 records an agreement between
a woman and a man to enable her to build a house against the west wall of his
'
house: - thy house, upon which the walls of my house abut at the south and
north, thy wall serving me as a supporting wall, provided I do not place beams
And I will lay my beams from south to north so that I may roof
upon it ...
over the lower storey of my house if I desire to build higher . . . And I will
leave the light-well opposite thy two windows the distance of a brick from the
This agreement
bricks which are built against thy house opposite thy windows/
of the man's
of
walls
the
for
the
under
certain
conditions,
use,
clearly provides
house as a party-wall while at the same time safeguarding his ancient light.
Other references to the use to which a party wall may be put17, and to the
preservation of an ancient light18occur in other papyri. These tantalizing morsels
are all that we possess, but they certainly do not hint at any actual building
legislation and it seems unlikely that any existed, at least in Pharaonic times.
A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY
General:
E. Baldwin Smith, EgyptianArchitectureas CulturalExpression(Appleton
1938), especially chapters 2 and 9.
Somers Clarke and R. Engelbach, Ancient Egyptian Masonry, (Oxford
193)Housing:
Apart from the books on Tell el Amarna quoted below:
Seton Lloyd, Model of a Tell el-Amarnah House {journal of Egyptian
Archaeology19, 1 7 ) .
N. de Garis Davies, The Town House in Ancient Egypt (Metropolitan
Museum Studies No. 1 (1929).
Chr. Desroches, Un modelede maisoncitadine du NouvelEmpire(Revued
Egyptologie3, 17-2$).
16 Pap. B.M. 10524 - Glanville, Catalogueof DemoticPapyri in the BritishMuseum,I, pp. 21, 22.
17 Pap. Leyden 378 - Glanville, op. at. I, pp. 25, 26.
18 Pap. B.M, 10500 - Glanville, op. at. I, pp. 46, 47.

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R. Engelbach, Four Modelsof Graeco-romanBuildings (Annalesdu Service,

31,

129-131.)

M. Pillet, Des venous egyptiensmodelesde maisons (Revue d' Egyptologie,

4, 27-43).
Kahun:
Petrie, Kahun, Gurob and Hawara, pl. xv, pp. 21-32; lllahun, Kahun
and Gurob, pl. xiv and pp. -8; see also Ricke, Der Grundrissdes
Amarna-wohnhauses,
c2-cc, and figs. 47 and 48,
Amarna :
Pendlebury, Tell el Amarna(Lovat Dickson, 193$): excellent general
account.
Petrie, Tell el Amarna: (first excavation on the site).
Peet and Woolley, The City of Akhenaten,1: excavation of South City,
Maruaten, River Temple and Workers' Village.
Frankfort and Pendlebury, The City of Akhenaten,II: excavation of
the North Suburb.
Pendlebury, The City of Akhenaten,HI: now in the press, will contain
the full account of the Central City.
houses excavated by the
Ricke, Der Grundrissdes Amarna-wohnhauses:
Germans, together with comparative material.
Frankfort (editor), The Mural Tainting of El Amarneh.
Deir el Medineh:
B. Bruyere, Rapport sur les Fouilles de Deir el Medineh (1934-19357:
lllme Partie: Le Villaqeetc. (Cairo 1939).
Fortresses:
Somers Clarke, AncientEgyptian Frontier Fortresses(Journal of Egyptian
Archaeology,3, 1^^-179).
Borchardt, AltagyptischeFestungen an der zweiten Nilschnelle (Leipzig
1923).

T. Save-Soderbergh, Aegyptenund Nubien (Lund 1941), pp. 80-98.

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