town planning in Ptolemaic Egypt.pdf

Town Planning in Pharaonic EgyptAuthor(s): H. W. FairmanSource: The Town Planning Review, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Apr., 1949), pp. 32-51Published by: Liverpool University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40101924 .

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32 TOWN PLANNING IN PHARAONIC EGYPT april

Fig. I- BLOCK PLAN OF TELL EL AMARNA



TOWN PLANNING

IN 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

by the 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 Akbenaten III (now in the press) from which figs. 5 and 1 5 illustrating this paper have been adapted. I am most grateful to Mr. R. E. M. McCaughan for preparing the drawings and plans.




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. Many a modern Egyptian town and village must be built on the ruins of an ancient Egyptian settlement. 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 assuming that a solution had to be sought upwards. The problem must have been particularly acute in the Delta with its swamps, and there is a marked literary tradition of urban development in the Delta, the texts contrasting the inhabited town mounds of the Delta with the villages of Upper Egypt.

The earliest dwellings in Egypt have been found in a number of Predynastic2 settlements along the present desert edge. They were roughly circular or oval in shape and apparently were little more than hoops or screens of reeds or mats, often daubed with mud. At Merimde in 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 distance above the surface. Whereas in Upper Egypt settlements and cemeteries were always separate, at Merimde and El Omari burials were found either under the floors of huts or just outside them. This confronts us with the very old Egyptian idea 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 Negada II, when bricks were introduced, we find rectangular houses and tombs. A clay model of this period shows a small rectangular house with flat roof, perhaps surmounted with 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 arranged in 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.



1949 H. W. FAIRMAN 3^

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 of a mile by a quarter of a mile and to be Negada I in date, with a possibility of a Badarian occupation4, and at Negada itself, the most important predynastic site in Egypt, the

Fig.2 HIEROGLYPH OF "CITY." After Griffith, Hieroglyphs, No. 142.

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 Kab8 both seem to have been oval or circular. The normal hieroglyphic word-sign or determinative of *

town,' *

city ' shows a circular enclosure

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 com-

posed 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 Predynastic Town-site at Hierakonpolis in Griffith Studies, 272-6. 5 Petrie, Diospolis, pl. vi ; Capart, Primitive Art 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, Hierakonpolis II, 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 Service 8, 135. 11 Quibell, Archaic Mastabas, pp. 11, 12, 29 and pls. xxx, xxxi, 2, 3.




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. Just as in life the courtiers would seek houses close to the palace, so in death

they desired their ' houses of eternity/ their tombs, to be near the resting place of their lord. This can be seen most clearly at Gizeh where a veritable

city of the dead exists around the pyramids.12 In the centre is the pyramid 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 1 369-1 354 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%a 77, second frontispiece; Reisner, A History of the Givyt

Necropolis, Vol. 1, Map 1.



1949 H. W. FAIRMAN 37

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 so- called '

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,




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-



1949 H. W. F AIRMAN 39

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



4o TOWN PLANNING IN PHARAONIC EGYPT april

Fig. 5- RECONSTRUCTION OF PART OF THE CENTRAL CITY

Adapted by permission of the Egypt Exploration Society, from City of Akhenaten III, pl. ii

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 wall- trench 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



1949 H. W . F AIRMAN 41

(Fig. 1 $). Inscriptions hint that this part of the city bore a special name: - ' The Island' (called)

" Aten distinguished in Jubilees".' The western boundary 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, con-

sisting 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 reduced to guesswork, but it is more than

Fig. 6. DRAWING OF AN ANCIENT MODEL OF A TOWN-HOUSE. After Revue d* Egyptologie III, Fig. 3




Fig. 7- INTERIOR OF A TOWN HOUSE After Davies, Town House in Ancient Egypt, Fig. la and b

doubtful whether Amarna was typical. By this it is not implied that there was anything unique in Amarna housing, for it is clear that the Amarna house was fully in keeping with tradition, and other houses of the same general type have been found elsewhere in Egypt and the Sudan. It must be remembered that as Amarna was built in virgin desert, there was ample room for expansion. Such conditions did not obtain at Thebes or Memphis and there is evidence that in such cities, the Amarna bungalow type being impracticable, the houses of the wealthy were composed of several storeys. Fundamentally these 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 drawing of 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



1 949 H . W . F AIRMAN 43

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

storeys13, and other models and the * soul-houses '14 of the same 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 con-

nection with the construction of the pyramid of Sesostris II (1897-1879 B.C.) of the XII th 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

1 3 Annales du Service \ 2, 31 ; Baldwin Smith, op. cit.y pl. lxvi, 3. 1 4 e.g. Petrie, Gi^eh and RJfeb, pls. xv-xxii. i5 Petrie, Pyramids and Temples of Gi%ehy p. 101 ; Holscher, Das Grabdenkmal des Kbnigs Chepbren,

(Leipzig 191 2), 36, 70 and Taf. ii.




(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



1949 H . W . F AIRMAN AS

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




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. i£28-i£i2 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



1 949 H . W . F AIRMAN 47

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




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



Fig. 13- MODEL OF AN AMARNA HOUSE Photograph by courtesy of the Egyptian Exploration Society

Plate 5

Fig. 14- WORKERS' VILLAGE AT DEIR EL MEDINEH, FROM THE NORTH After Bruyere, Fouilles de Deir el Medineh (1934-35), pl. iii



Fig. 15- TELL EL AMARNA



1949 W. W. F AIRMAN 49

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 eventually covered all the cliflf to the west of the village, the numerous votive chapels erected just to the north, and police posts built at either end of the valley.

Our last source of information on town-planning is provided by Egyptian fortresses. Space will only permit of the briefest account. The earlier type was not necessarily regular in shape; particularly in 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 vulnerable points. Inside the fortress there would be one or two main roads, always a temple, and houses were neatly and geometrically arranged on 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. Usually a wide space was preserved between the outer wall and the houses to allow troops to manoeuvre and to move about rapidly. Since there was normally no internal water supply, a ' water gate

J or covered passage was always built down to the river so that under all conditions water might be drawn in safety. Later, after the pacification of 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 unnecessary buttresses at regular intervals) and with a generally geometrical lay-out of the buildings.

It can hardly be 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 government for specific purposes, planning originally was systematic and careful and there was strict control over both buildings and their occupants. The evidence about cities is less clear, but my personal feeling is that while there was probably in the first place a rough general ground plan, building and development within that framework was not really controlled but was haphazard, and whatever planning there was would tend to deter- iorate as time progressed. Though there was naturally some form of

Fig. 16. PLAN OF THE FORTRESS OF SEMNEH After Bulletin of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts

xxiii, fig. on p. 22



So TOWN PLANNING IN PHARAONIC EGYPT april

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

upon it ... And I will lay my beams from south to north so that I may roof 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 bricks which are built against thy house opposite thy windows/ This agreement clearly provides for the use, under certain conditions, of the walls of the man's 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 light18 occur 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.

16 Pap. B.M. 10524 - Glanville, Catalogue of Demotic Papyri in the British Museum, I, pp. 21, 22. 1 7 Pap. Leyden 378 - Glanville, op. at. I, pp. 25, 26. 18 Pap. B.M, 10500 - Glanville, op. at. I, pp. 46, 47.

A SHORT BIBLIOGRAPHY General:

E. Baldwin Smith, Egyptian Architecture as Cultural Expression (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 Archaeology 19, 1 - 7 ) .

N. de Garis Davies, The Town House in Ancient Egypt (Metropolitan Museum Studies No. 1 (1929).

Chr. Desroches, Un modele de maison citadine du Nouvel Empire (Revue d

Egyptologie 3, 17-2$).



1949 H. W. FAIRMAN p

R. Engelbach, Four Models of Graeco-roman Buildings (Annales du Service, 31, 129-131.)

M. Pillet, Des venous egyptiens modeles de 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 Grundriss des 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.

Ricke, Der Grundriss des Amarna-wohnhauses: houses excavated by the 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 Villaqe etc. (Cairo 1939).

Fortresses: Somers Clarke, Ancient Egyptian Frontier Fortresses (Journal of Egyptian

Archaeology, 3, 1^^-179). Borchardt, Altagyptische Festungen an der zweiten Nilschnelle (Leipzig

1923). T. Save-Soderbergh, Aegypten und Nubien (Lund 1941), pp. 80-98.



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