House of Life in Ancient Egypt

Although schools as you know them today did not exist, the House of Life was an institution that provided some education and training for a select few. A House of Life was attached to most temples. Each stored a number of texts relevant to that particular temple. The term is often mistranslated as a school, university, library, or archive. However, it was a strange institution that was all of these things and yet did not fit any of the descriptions particularly well.
Although shrouded (intentionally) in mystery, the following is known about this institution:

• The House of Life stored a number of religious texts, which were used for training priests and medical professionals. Being educated here was a great privilege, available to only a chosen few. However, how students were chosen remains unknown.
• The priests in charge of the House of Life were responsible for conserving, copying, and storing religious texts. The texts stored here were world famous. Later, Greek and Roman authors praised the wisdom recorded in these texts. The texts are said to include information about medicine, medical herbs, geography, geometry, astronomy, and the history of kings.
• The institution was not open to the public. The extremely restricted access only enhanced its aura of mystery. Many literary tales refer to texts stored in the House of Life that have information on how to speak the language of all animals, birds, and fish in the world, as well as a text that enables the reader to see the sun god. Powerful stuff, indeed!

Schools of Ancient Egypt

School as you know it didn’t exist in ancient Egypt, but for want of a better word I have to use the term. Egyptian schools didn’t include large buildings, complete with classrooms and playing fields. There was no smell of chalk and there were definitely no uniforms.
Royalty and the upper elite were taught in temple or palace schools, which were run by the state and consisted of a tutor and a small group of handchosen boys. Records indicate that particularly gifted boys were accepted into the schools, even if they were from non-elite families – so the lower classes had at least some hope.
Although some girls were educated, it wasn’t the norm. If a girl did receive an education, it wasn’t in these state-run institutions. Because women were unable to hold administrative positions, educating girls seemed like a pointless task to many ancient Egyptians. One Egyptian called Ankhsheshonq immortalised this idea with the following quote: ‘Instructing a woman is like having a sack of sand whose side is split open.’ Charming!
Some of these formal temple and palace schools taught specific trades and only accepted boys from families of certain occupations, such as scribes or magistrates. Children leaving these schools were then employed in the central government.
For boys not accepted into the elite educational institutions, local alternatives existed. Boys in most villages learned only basic literacy skills if their father was a scribe – normally in preparation for taking his place as a scribe. Village scribes also occasionally decided to teach groups of village children reading and writing as a means of boosting income.

Housing Plan of Ancient Egypt

Houses in Egyptian villages were generally very basic. Although some were larger than others (depending on the wealth and status of the owner), the average house at Deir el Medina, Gurob, and Amarna consisted of four rooms:

• A front room leading from the street, which may have been used as a meeting place for guests.
• A living room where the household shrine was situated. The family would worship their personal gods or ancestors here.
• A living space, probably used as a sleeping area, with a staircase to a flat roof or upper floor.
• A kitchen at the rear of the house, which was open to the sky to prevent the room from filling with smoke.

Cellars underneath the rear rooms were used as storage for foodstuffs.
Houses were small so each room was multi-purpose. The houses of the elite, more appropriately described as mansions, followed a similar layout to the small houses, although they consisted of a number of small suites of rooms joined by interlinking corridors. These gave the elite owners the privilege of separating the public from the private family quarters. Many mansions also contained

• An audience chamber in which to greet visitors.
• An office in which to conduct business.
• A bathroom with built-in shower area (essentially a stone slab and a servant with a jug of water) and toilet (a horseshoe-shaped wooden seat over a bowl of sand). Some homes at Pi-Rameses also had sunken baths open to the sky – to catch some rays while bathing. _ Women’s quarters, for privacy rather than confinement. These quarters provided living, dressing, and sleeping areas from the rest of the household.

All houses in ancient Egypt were nearly bursting at the seams with people. The mansions were run like estates. In addition to the owner and his family, a plethora of employees, administrators, and servants lived in these larger homes.
Small homes were even more crowded. An Egyptian couple may have had up to 15 children, all living in a single four-roomed house. When men married, their wives moved into the home as well; and when the wives had children, the children potentially also lived in the house. It was not unusual for three or four generations – as many as 20 people, mostly children – to be living in these small houses. The Egyptians truly knew the meaning of no privacy and no space.

Planning an ancient egypt village

The layout of each surviving village differs depending on whether it was built as a single project (for example, to house tomb builders) or whether it was allowed to develop naturally. Most villages needed to be near the Nile or a canal to provide a water source, and have agricultural land for food, although in the case of Deir el Medina, the state brought in water and food basics for the villagers.
Planners for single-project sites (like Deir el Medina and Amarna) built the most important building, either the temple or the palace, first, and then the elite houses were constructed around this structure. In the pre-planned villages, the streets are evenly laid out and houses arranged in neat rows. But as these towns expanded and developed, houses were extended, and new smaller houses were built among the larger mansions, destroying the grid layout.
Naturally developing settlements aren’t half as tidy as planned villages. No grids divide the settlement, and the general appearance is more haphazard. Planned villages have a uniformity of house style and size, whereas in naturally developing villages the house styles are irregular because people built according to taste and need.

Village life of Ancient Egypt

Most information about ancient Egypt comes from research and exploration of tombs and temples. Although these structures and the treasures they hold are truly fascinating, examining only tombs, mummies, and treasures gives a biased view of the Egyptians as a morbid nation that was obsessed with death. Although dying was immensely important to the Egyptians, so was living! To fully understand these people, you need to look at their villages – the centres of their regular, everyday life.
Although the tombs were built of stone and meant to last forever, the villages were made of mud-brick and were not intended to last. Fortunately, researchers have identified several villages that somehow endured, providing valuable information about the Egyptian lifestyle. Unfortunately, these villages are mainly special settlements inhabited by the elite; as such they don’t necessarily give an accurate overview of the life of all Egyptians, rich and poor.
The most important villages are:

• Deir el Medina on the west bank of the Nile at Thebes in the south of Egypt. Amenhotep I of the 18th dynasty built Deir el Medina to house the workmen who constructed the royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings. The village was occupied until the late 20th dynasty. Today the foundations of the village are still visible, including staircases, cellars, ovens, and elaborately decorated tombs, some virtually complete with mummies and treasures.
• Kahun in the Faiyum region dates to the Middle Kingdom and was built to accommodate the workmen who built the pyramid of Senwosret III, although it was inhabited for a number of years after the death of the king. The remains at the site are quite substantial, with three-quarters of the settlement foundations surviving, showing three styles of houses: mansions, large houses, and the equivalent of small terraces.
• Pi-Rameses is situated in the eastern Delta region and was the capital city of Ramses II of the 19th dynasty. The village covered an area of approximately 5 kilometres, and excavations at the site have uncovered a number of temples, palaces, and houses for the elite and their servants. The remains are very fragmentary because many building blocks were reused in later periods.
• Avaris, located very close to Pi-Rameses in the Delta, was the capital of the Hyksos kings from the second intermediate period (see Chapter 3). Many Asiatics (primarily from the Palestine, Syria, and Canaan region) lived at this site, which the village’s style of temples and houses reflected.
• Amarna, about halfway between Cairo and Luxor, was the home of Akhenaten from the 18th dynasty. The village stretches for a distance of approximately 7 kilometres and included a number of palaces and temples as well as army barracks, two settlement districts, and a workmen’s village similar to Deir el Medina. So many archaeological remains have been found at this site that it is often used as a blueprint for all Egyptian settlements.

You can visit Deir el Medina on the west bank at Luxor and see the layout of the whole settlement. The more adventurous tourist can visit Amarna in Middle Egypt. The archaeologists have reconstructed some sample buildings to give the gist of what it may have looked like.