[27] In M. MASPERO'S translated _Roman de Satni (Annuaire de l'Association pour l'Encouragement des Études grecques_, 1878), the house in Bubastis inhabited by the daughter of a priest of high rank is thus described: "Satni proceeded towards the west of the town until he came to a very high house. It had a wall round it; a garden on the north side; a flight of steps before the door."
[Illustration: FIG. 12.--Bird's-eye view of a villa, restored by Ch. Chipiez.]
When a man was at all easy in his circumstances he chose for his dwelling a house in which all elegance and artistic elaboration was reserved for himself--a bare wall was turned to the noise of the street. Houses constructed upon such a principle covered, of course, a proportionally large space of ground. The walls of Babylon inclosed fields, gardens, and vineyards;[28] and it is probable that much of the land embraced by those of Thebes was occupied in similar fashion by those inclosures round the dwellings of the rich, which might be compared to an Anglo-Indian "compound."
The house, of which a restoration appears on page 31 (Fig. 12), a restoration which is based upon the plan found by Rosellini in a Theban tomb (Fig. 3), is generally considered to have been a country villa belonging to the king. We do not concur in that opinion, however. It appears to us quite possible that in the fashionable quarters--if we may use such a phrase--of Memphis and Thebes, the houses of the great may have shewn such combinations of architecture and garden as this. There are trees and creeping plants in front of the house shown in Fig. 1 also. Both are inclosed within a wall pierced by one large door.
Even the houses of the poor seem generally to have had their courtyards, at the back of which a structure was raised consisting of a single story surmounted by a flat roof, to which access was given by an external staircase. This arrangement, which is to be seen in a small model of a house which belongs to the Egyptian collection in the Louvre (Fig. 13), does not differ from that which is still in force in the villages of Egypt.[29]
[29] WILKINSON, _The Manners and Customs of the Ancient Egyptians_, vol. i. p. 377.
In the larger houses the chambers were distributed around two or three sides of a court. The building, which has been alluded to as the Palace at Tell-el-Amarna, with many others in the same city (Figs. 14, 15, 16), affords an example of their arrangement. Sometimes, as in another and neighbouring house, the chambers opened upon a long corridor. The offices were upon the ground floor, while the family inhabited the stories above it. The flat top of the house had a parapet round it, and sometimes a light outer roof supported by slender columns of brilliantly painted wood. This open story is well shown in Fig. 1 and in a box for holding funerary statuettes, which is in the Louvre. It is reproduced in Fig. 18. Upon that part of the roof which was not covered a kind of screen of planks was fixed, which served to establish a current of air, and to ventilate the house (Fig. 19). Sometimes one part of a house was higher than the rest, forming a kind of tower (Fig. 20). Finally, some houses were crowned with a parapet finishing at the top in a row of rounded battlements (Fig. 21). In very large houses the entrance to the courtyard was ornamented with a porch supported by two pillars, with lotus flower capitals, to which banners were tied upon _fête_ days (Fig. 22). Sometimes the name of the proprietor, sometimes a hospitable sentiment, was inscribed upon the lintel (Fig. 23).