bay A simple surveying tool made from a palm rib, probably used for sighting in the manner of a modern theodolite.
burial chamber A room inside a tomb, usually underground, that contained the mummy of the deceased and burial items. It was intended to be sealed forever after the burial had taken place.
cubit A unit of measurement represented by the length of a bent human elbow to the tips of the middle fingers. In Egypt, the earliest standard measure was the royal cubit, which was about 20 in. (52.5 cm) in length.
funeral complex Also called mortuary complexes. An assemblage of monuments built in association with the burial of the deceased pharaoh. One of the best-known funeral complexes is the Step Pyramid of Djoser (Third Dynasty).
heb-sed A festival that celebrated the continued rule of the king after he had been on the throne for 30 years (with some exceptions), and was then repeated every three years after that. It was a jubilee meant to rejuvenate the strength and stamina of the king and involved an elaborate procession, rituals, and offerings.
mastaba An Arabic term for a type of bench that sits outside many modern Egyptian village houses. The term is used by Egyptologists to describe a type of ancient nonroyal elite tomb superstructure that imitates the mastaba shape (flat roofed and rectangular, with outward sloping sides).
merkhet A surveying tool used in leveling to maintain a straight line. It was essentially an L-shape plumb bob secured on a holder aligned with a cleft staff. The bob would hang from the short vertical arm.
mortuary temples Temples dedicated to commemorating the cult of the deceased king and the reign of the pharaoh (often a son) who commissioned or completed its construction.
offering chamber Also called a funerary chapel. A place (usually above ground) that was accessible to visitors to perform rites and make offerings of food and drink for the cult of the deceased.
pylon A monumental gateway that flanked the entrance of Egyptian temples. It consists of two tapering towers joined by a lower section containing the entrance. Pylons were important symbolic components of temple architecture because they represented the horizon (akhet) from which the sun rose.
pyramid town A settlement for priests and others responsible for the pyramid construction and cult maintenance of the deceased king, which began during the Old Kingdom. The town could consist of residential houses, workmen’s barracks, storage buildings, granaries, workshops, gardens, and administrative centers.
rock-cut tomb From the Old Kingdom onward, tombs began to be carved into the rock, usually on the side of a hill, as a cheaper alternative to mastabas.
royal city The residence of the pharaoh and central administration, which was also usually the capital of the country. It contained palaces, temples, administrative buildings, storehouses, barracks, granaries, houses for the court and high officials, as well as a suburban area for nonroyals.
step pyramid The earliest pyramids were step pyramids, architectural structures that used flat platforms or steps, which receded from the ground up. The Third Dynasty architect Imhotep designed the first, largest, and most famous step pyramid at Saqqara as a tomb for the pharaoh Djoser.
traditional pyramid In the Fourth Dynasty, Egyptians began to build true pyramids that have smooth sides. The first attempts occurred at Meidum and Dahshur under King Snefru, and eventually led to the construction of the great pyramids at Giza.
tumuli Also called burial mounds. Mounds of earth, sand, or stone superstructures, which marked the placement of graves.
Valley of the Kings Located on the West Bank of the Nile, opposite modern Luxor, a number of tombs were constructed for the pharaohs of the New Kingdom west of a mountain peak with a natural pyramid shape. About 63 tombs have been discovered here, most of which were robbed in antiquity; the greatest assemblage of burial equipment was found in the famous tomb of King Tutankhamun.
Valley of the Queens The burial place for the wives of pharaohs of the 18th to 20th Dynasties on the West Bank of the Nile at Thebes. Princes, princesses, and other royal family members were buried here alongside the queens. The most spectacular tomb here belonged to Queen Nefertari, wife of Ramesses II.
Egyptian pyramids, tombs, and temples still stand as pinnacles of ancient engineering, inspiring awe and prompting questions about how premodern technologies could construct them. However, most Egyptian architecture was built of mud brick and plaster. With a ready supply of Nile silt and the hot sun to bake them, mud bricks were simple to make and manipulate. Limestone, sandstone, and granite were most commonly quarried as building material for large structures. Shaping of the blocks could be done at the quarry before being transported, with additional detailing added at the construction site. Egyptian builders mastered a basic tool kit consisting of measuring rods (in cubit units of about 20½ in./0.525 m and smaller subdivisions), engineers’ squares, the bay (an instrument for sighting lines over a distance), and the merkhet (a device for gauging astronomical alignments), with which they achieved impressive accuracy—often less than an inch or so from being perfectly level or straight. Probably in different but coordinated configurations per project, several types of ramps facilitated the lifting of blocks weighing many tons to elevations that seem unimaginable without cranes. The ramps were dismantled upon completion of the building, leaving scant archaeological remnants at pyramid and temple sites.
Ancient Egyptian construction created enduring testaments to what is attainable when people put their minds—and thousands of well-organized arms, legs, and backs—to it.
Quarrying for building resources was itself a resource-intensive process. Many kings simplified matters by cutting corners—literally—by stripping stone from earlier royal monuments to use in their own. They did not necessarily see this practice as vandalism, but rather as the incorporation of the past into their own reigns. By building on the foundations of their forebears (again, sometimes quite literally), they maintained the continuity of Egyptian kingship in unison with architectural tradition.
LUDWIG BORCHARDT
1863–1938
German Egyptologist
ALEXANDER BADAWY
1913–1986
Egyptian architect and archaeologist
DIETER ARNOLD
1936–
German Egyptologist; Curator, Metropolitan Museum of Art
Nicholas Picardo
Organized teams built the impressive stone structures that still survive today, but most buildings were made from mud brick.
What brings ancient Egypt to mind faster than the pyramids, man-made mountains of limestone? These iconic structures served primarily, but not exclusively, as royal burial places, the results of national projects to guarantee a successful afterlife for the deceased pharaoh, and by extension the order of the nation. Conscripted Egyptians—not Hebrew slaves—built these complexes, consisting of the pyramid, pyramid temple, a long causeway to a valley temple, and smaller satellite and/or queens’ pyramids. They were both cosmic staircases to the heavens and mansions of eternity. The famous pyramids at Giza, built in the Fourth Dynasty, resulted from years of experimentation. Mud-brick tumuli and rectangular mastaba tombs were expanded to step pyramids (King Djoser at Saqqara), then to the traditional pyramid form (King Snefru at Meidum, Dahshur), before reaching a zenith at Giza under Kings Khufu, Khafre, and Menkaure. Khufu’s Great Pyramid, the only surviving Wonder of the Ancient World, originally stood 481 ft. (146.5 m) high. No royal pyramids are found after the 17th Dynasty, but small pyramids adorned elite tombs at Thebes in the New Kingdom. Nubian royalty adopted the form; in fact, there are more pyramids in Nubia (about 255) than in Egypt (about 118).
As parts of massive funeral complexes for individual pharaohs, the pyramids helped define social stratification and bureaucratic project management during the Old Kingdom.
At Giza, fine white limestone casing blocks that once covered the pyramids were removed to build medieval Cairo. They survive only at the top of Khafre’s pyramid (the second to be built). Decoration was sparse inside the Old Kingdom pyramids until the reign of Unas, last king of the Fifth Dynasty, when the Pyramid Texts, spells to guide the king on his netherworldly journey, first appear at Saqqara.
SNEFRU
reigned 2575–2551 BCE
First pharaoh of Fourth Dynasty; built four pyramids, three of them colossal (at Meidum and Dahshur)
KHUFU
reigned 2551–2528 BCE
Second pharaoh of Fourth Dynasty, son of Snefru; built the Great Pyramid at Giza
IMHOTEP
reign of Djoser 2630–2611 BCE
Thought to be Djoser’s architect (tomb not yet located)
Peter Der Manuelian
The Egyptians achieved the traditional pyramid form only after a few generations of experimentation.
Most Egyptian towns had one or more temples dedicated to their main god(s). Temples symbolized the site of the original cosmic creation and housed divine cult statues that were fed, dressed, and adored by priests in daily ceremonies and carried to other sacred locations in public festival processions. The largest and most enduring was the Temple of Amun at Karnak, begun in the Middle Kingdom and augmented for the next 2,000 years with additional shrines, pylons, and columned halls. Offerings (often foodstuffs grown on temple lands or products crafted in temple workshops) were laid before the gods and then redistributed to temple priests and other workers as payment for their services. Temples were an important part of the national economy, because they could own tremendous tracts of farmland, vineyards, and herds of animals, while employing thousands of workers to produce crops and other commodities; scribes and administrators to record and distribute these products; and priests, who carried out the daily cult responsibilities. It was the job of the king, as nominal high priest of every god, to supply provisions and expand the temples, dedicating land, slaves, and spoils of war to their upkeep. By pleasing the gods, the king maintained cosmic order (maat) and secured favor for himself and the whole nation.
Temples were significant focal points in the religious, economic, and social fabric of ancient Egypt; they were places of cultic ritual, political propaganda, and economic redistribution.
The Third Dynasty Step Pyramid Complex of King Djoser at Saqqara marked the first appearance of monumental stone architecture and provided a blueprint for later pyramid/funerary temple complexes, such as the famous examples at Giza. Mortuary temples, called “Mansions of Millions of Years” and dedicated to the perpetual maintenance of the cults of deceased and deified pharaohs, continued to be built through the New Kingdom, usually on the sacred West Bank of Thebes.
IMHOTEP
reign of Djoser 2630–2611 BCE
Third Dynasty priest, engineer, and architect of the Step Pyramid of King Djoser
Rachel Aronin
Ancient Egyptian temples were elaborate complexes, built for economic and political purposes, as well as for religious rites.
Expectations are high for someone whose name can translate as “the one made perfect.” Snefru, first king of the Fourth Dynasty, certainly delivered, however imperfect historical records are about the length of his reign (24 to 46 years, starting in 2575 BCE) and his parentage. His accomplishments rank him among Egypt’s great kings. His father was probably Huni, last king of the Third Dynasty, though only a literary source suggests this. Queen Meresankh I, possibly a minor wife of Huni, was his mother. Snefru’s wife, Hetepheres, was possibly Huni’s daughter, thus his half-sister. That their son, Khufu, is remembered as the greatest pyramid builder attests that, for posterity, size matters. Khufu’s Great Pyramid at Giza is the largest ever constructed. However, with at least four pyramids, Snefru’s building program was most prolific, requiring the largest resource investment of the Pyramid age.
Snefru originated the traditional pyramid style, a recurring hallmark of Egyptian architecture for more than one thousand years. Two of his monuments recall the Third Dynasty, when King Djoser (2630–2611 BCE) erected the first royal pyramid—a stepped structure, then the largest stone building in the world. Huni may have begun constructing small step pyramids (seven known) throughout the country, to which Snefru contributed at least one at Seila. Development of the traditional pyramidal form was not seamless. Snefru began a 300-ft. (92-m) high, stepped monument at Meidum, subsequently filling out its exterior to form a traditional pyramid. Over halfway up his 344-ft. (105-m) high southern pyramid at Dahshur, shifting foundations necessitated an abrupt change in slope that inspired its modern name, the Bent Pyramid. Architects avoided such difficulties with Snefru’s probable resting place, the equally tall Northern (or Red) Pyramid at Dashur—the first colossal monument ever to be executed, uninhibited from start to finish, as a traditional pyramid.
Amassing resources for Egypt was a priority for Snefru. One expedition procured foreign wood—possibly including some Lebanese cedar, which was highly prized—with which he commissioned more than 60 ships and furnished royal buildings. Campaigns west to Libya and south into Nubia brought more than 8,000 captives and at least 213,000 head of livestock back to Egypt. Snefru’s endeavors set the tone for the remainder of the Old Kingdom, during which his successors’ similar policies effectively depopulated northern Nubia. However, it was for forays into the turquoise-rich Sinai Peninsula that later generations remembered Snefru as a divine patron of this northeast region and as the “smiter” of foreign peoples. More generally, though, he was recollected fondly as a benevolent ruler.
Nicholas Picardo
The Egyptians tended to situate their tombs in the Western Desert, which, as the place where the sun set each night, was regarded as the land of the dead. Tomb architecture usually consisted of two main sections: an accessible above-ground offering chamber or chapel and a sealed subterranean burial apartment. In the chapel, priests and family members left gifts of food and drink before a “false door,” through which the deceased’s spirit was believed to emerge to take nourishment. In the Old and Middle Kingdoms, tombs were laid out formally in elite cemeteries near the royal pyramids, so that officials could share in the blessed afterlife of their king. After the collapse of the state at the end of the Sixth Dynasty, rock-cut tombs carved into cliffs bordering the Nile became common in the provinces of Middle and Upper Egypt. Chapels could be decorated with carved and painted reliefs of idealized scenes of daily life, showing the tomb owner receiving offerings, overseeing agriculture or craft-production, or hunting and fishing. During the New Kingdom, increased access to mortuary literature led to new ritual and religious imagery appearing on private tomb walls, including funerary banquets and festivals, and deities associated with the afterlife, such as Osiris, Anubis, and Hathor.
Tombs were fashioned as houses for eternity, constructed from enduring stone rather than more perishable materials, like the mud bricks that formed actual earthly domiciles.
Some of the most splendidly decorated New Kingdom private tombs belonged to the skilled craftsmen of the village of Deir el-Medina, the same men who built the magnificent royal tombs in the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens. Later, during the Saite Renaissance of the 26th Dynasty, a number of very large, “archaizing” tombs were built at Thebes and Saqqara, deliberately hearkening back to the styles and/or iconography of earlier eras.
Rachel Aronin
Nobles and high officials could be buried in rock-cut tombs (top left). Elaborate decorations often included images of Osiris (bottom).
It is impossible to point to a “typical” ancient Egyptian settlement. Many small, informally built villages in which a large percentage of the population probably lived are now lost beneath modern developments. Most of the best-known settlements were founded by the state for special purposes. The so-called Lost City of the Pyramid Builders at Giza provides a sense of the complexity of an Old Kingdom pyramid town, consisting of an organized patchwork of administrative buildings, workshops, storage facilities, and workers’ lodgings. The gridded plan of King Senwosret II’s pyramid town at Kahun is emblematic of Middle Kingdom tendencies for planning and regulation, with a modular layout based on a strictly limited number of house sizes, ranging from huge mansions to small houses of just a few rooms and sectioned into blocks by a highly regular street system. The Amarna Period capital of Akhetaten (Tell el-Amarna) is the best surviving example of a sprawling capital city, with suburbs and a downtown administrative district all linked by a great thoroughfare on which King Akhenaten made regular displays of royal pageantry. In the residential zones, large villas often were associated with smaller houses, where dependents of their estates resided.
The variety in forms, functions, and social makeup of ancient Egyptian settlements ensure that knowledge about many aspects will remain rather unsettled for years to come.
Usually limited in size and repetitious in use of one house style, workers’ settlements served specific projects. A town of only barracklike gallery houses accommodated Middle Kingdom quarrying expeditions in the Fayum at Qasr el-Sagha. New Kingdom artisans and artists who outfitted the Valley of the Kings and Valley of the Queens occupied the more irregular village of Deir el-Medina, possibly relocating to the square, desert village of Akhetaten for similar employment during the Amarna Period.
SIR WILLIAM MATTHEW FLINDERS PETRIE
1853–1942
British archaeologist and Egyptologist
LUDWIG BORHARDT
1863–1938
German Egyptologist
MARK LEHNER
1950–
American archaeologist and Egyptologist
Nicholas Picardo
Intended for temporary use, workers’ towns had grid layouts and basic housing.
The personal, political, and religious aspects of kingship converged in palaces. Some kings commissioned several, each emphasizing some royal needs over others—primary state residences, provincial palaces, ceremonial structures, and even palaces for the afterlife. As domestic architecture, their construction was of mud brick with some stone fixtures. Pharaohs often built palaces in new settlements, such as pyramid towns through the Middle Kingdom and in royal cities from the New Kingdom onward. Archaeological and textual evidence indicates that palaces could include private living apartments with baths and robing rooms; women’s quarters; audience rooms; administrative offices; kitchens, workshops, weapons stores, and treasuries; housing for staff; and landscaped gardens with ponds. Commemorating a jubilee (heb-sed) festival, King Amenhotep III furnished his royal city at Malqata with a main palace plus three residential palaces, perhaps for Queen Tiye and other family members. Akhenaten’s capital at Tell el-Amarna included a fortified, residential North Riverside Palace, a nearby North Palace, and a templelike Great Palace (the per-Aten, “House of the Aten”) for governing (but with an attached “King’s House”). Likewise, King Merneptah’s palace at Memphis may have been more official than residential.
Just as Buckingham Palace and the White House are inseparable from their occupants today, for ancient Egyptians palaces were the architectural embodiments of king and country.
From early times, the person of the king and the royal residence were conceptually entwined. Before a cartouche came to signal a royal name in writing, the serekh—an emblem representing niched, “palace facade” architecture—advertised kingly status. One term for palace (per-aa, “great house”) gradually evolved to mean pharaoh. So closely linked were the kings with their palaces that many New Kingdom royal mortuary temples incorporated abbreviated palaces to perpetuate their dominions for eternity.
AMENHOTEP III
reigned 1390–1352 BCE
Ninth king of 18th Dynasty, New Kingdom
AMENHOTEP IV/AKHENATEN
reigned 1352–1336 BCE
Tenth king of 18th Dynasty, New Kingdom
MERNEPTAH
reigned 1213–1203 BCE
Fourth king of 19th Dynasty, New Kingdom
Nicholas Picardo
The serekh (top right) represented a palace facade surmounted by a Horus falcon. Akhenaten built several palaces at Tell al-Amarna.
Egypt always cast a wary eye toward Nubia, its southern neighbor. The first defensive gesture, made during the First Dynasty, was a fortification on Elephantine Island, at the original southern border of the country. After incursions into Egypt by Nubians in the First Intermediate Period, 12th Dynasty rulers sent armies south to curb the power of the chieftains of Lower Nubia, between the First and Second Cataracts. Additional security measures included building a series of mud-brick forts in Lower Nubia. Many of these contained architectural features associated with medieval forts: massive walls with bastions and additional ramparts with parapets, large gates, protective ditches surrounding the fort, corner towers, crenellated loopholes for archers, and stairways dug into the rock to ensure access to water. The garrisons were supplied from government armories in Egypt. The purpose of the forts was two-fold: to protect the exploitation of natural resources, such as gold and copper, and to ward off the Ruler of Kush, who controlled a vast territory at the Third Cataract and whose military might rivaled that of the Egyptian king. New Kingdom pharaohs conquered Nubia up to the Fourth Cataract, at which point the forts became home to large garrisons, and administrative offices were supplemented by religious structures.
During the 12th Dynasty, forts were built in Lower Nubia to protect Egypt’s southern frontier and its commercial interests in the area.
The fortified exterior walls of Buhen Fort, about 16 ft. 6 in. (5 m) thick, indicate that the fort was designed to withstand a siege. The interior, measuring around 426 ft. 6 in. x 361 ft. (130 x 110 m)—big enough to fit a football field—shows organized urban planning, with streets arranged in a grid pattern. Well-defined living areas include a two-story building that housed the general headquarters, adjacent to which were barracks.
SENWOSRET I
reigned 1971–1926 BCE
Second king of the 12th Dynasty
SENWOSRET III
reigned 1878–1841 BCE
Fifth king of the 12th Dynasty
THUTMOSE III
reigned 1479–1425 BCE
Fifth king of the 18th Dynasty
Ronald J. Leprohon
The mud-brick fortresses built at Semna and Uronarti during the 12th Dynasty defended the strategic location of the Second Cataract.
