Accommodation in Egypt

Lots of archaeologists have found it hard to get an exact idea of what Ancient Egyptian houses were like, because when the Nile river used to flood, it washed the majority of houses away. When the Egyptians worked on the tombs they built some special villages for the workers and craftsmen.

In the front room, of the houses, there was a bricked off area meant for a small shrine. In this section, families left food for the gods and ancestors, and babies were also born in the area. They were born here because the parents believed that the ancestors would protect their babies from being evil or wicked.

The second room was the main one in the house. Some small windows were placed up high to let light into the room, and mud benches were around the walls. There were rooms coming off that were shrines to gods. The next two rooms were smalls ones, one was a bedroom with sleeping mats on the floor and the other was a room where the craftsmen worked. Then there were steps that lead up to the roof, which was where the families ate there evening meal, and sometimes slept here . The kitchen was also outside, in a yard at the back of the house.

Some Interesting Facts:


1. Both rich and poor people built their houses out of mud brick and wood.
2. Smaller houses often had four rooms with an out courtyard.
3. The walls inside the house were painted with scenes of animals, the countryside and ancestors.
4. Inside houses there were stools, chairs, low tables, beds, and boxes to hold clothes, make-up, jewellery and household items.
5. Most houses have windows with no glass.
6. They used oil lanterns for extra lighting.
7. Rich People owned spacious villas in the country side. A typical villa had a pond filled with fish, a walled garden and an orchard of fruit trees
8. Houses were made from mud bricks dried in the sun. Mud was taken from the Nile and straw and pebbles were added to make it stronger.
9. The trunks of palm trees supported the flat roofs.
10. The inside of the house was covered with plaster and often painted.
11. Wealthy Egyptians lived in large houses with several stories but poorer families often lived in a crowded single room
12. In most homes there was a small shrine which the family worshipped
13. Mats of woven reeds covered the floors
14. Common furniture was wooden stools, chairs, tables, storage chests and carved beds
15. In Egypt it was considered good manners to eat with your fingers, in rich households servants would even bring round jugs of water between courses so that people could wash their hands
16. Pottery oil lamps provided the lighting in homes
17. Houses had very small windows to keep out the strong sun therefore cooling the house, because of this there was often very little natural light
18. Food was cooked in a clay oven or over an open fire
19. Most kitchens had a cylinder-shaped oven made from baked clay, which burned charcoal or wood as fuel
20. They cooked food in two handled pottery saucepans

Egyptians lived in houses made of bricks. They used to mix mud and chopped straw and it's poured into moulds. The moulds bake into hard bricks for homes. The bake by putting them into the sun.

The rich homes had about 10 rooms and the poor homes had one. Lime and water were mixed together and used to make the walls of the richer homes white. Some of richest homes had painted walls. They usually had blue or yellow walls with coloured ceilings. The borders were paintings of ducks or lotus petals, (which is a type of flower). The poor had floors made of beaten earth. The floors of the rich were tiled. Some rich people had a room with an altar that was used for family worship of the friendlier gods.