Life in Ancient Egypt
The marketplace was already crowded when the
farmer’s wife arrived to do her daily shopping.
She carefully wove her way through the crowd, gripping her basket
tightly. In her basket were goods
to trade for her family’s supper. Finely
woven mats and some sweet honey cakes would buy her a fine, fat goat, and maybe
even a deben’s worth of oil.
In The Marketplace
Egyptians At Home
How Do We Know That?
In The Marketplace
Each ancient Egyptian city had an outdoor marketplace where people went
every day to shop for food and supplies. In these marketplaces, Egyptian farmers and craftsmen set up
stalls for selling their goods. Farmers
often sold barley, emmer wheat, fruit, vegetables and flax for making linen.
They also sold cattle, goats, ducks an
d
geese.
The craftsmen filled their stalls with pottery, sandals, jewelry,
furniture and toys.
The ancient Egyptians did not use money; so all
purchases were really trades. Egyptian
shoppers brought homemade items such as mats, cloth, cakes and bread to barter
for the supplies they needed. For
example, a woman with a duck could barter her duck for a necklace.
Many of these exchanges were based on an Egyptian unit of measurement
called the deben. Goods were placed on one side of a scale and metal debens
were added to the other side until both sides balanced. This weighing process helped keep trading fair, so a
deben’s worth of dates could be traded for a deben’s worth of wheat.
Today a deben would weigh about three ounces.
Top of Page
Egyptians At Home
Common Egyptian homes were of a very simple, square design.
They were usually built very close together, and grouped along the banks
of the Nile. The houses were made
from mud bricks that were mixed with straw and baked in the sun.
Mud homes did not last long and often began to crumble.
When this happened, Egyptian builders flattened the remains and built a
new house over the old one.
Mud houses were cool and airy. The outside walls of these houses were painted white to
reflect the sun. Inside, high
windows helped to circulate air and keep out hot sunlight.
Just inside the front door of most Egyptian houses was
an entrance hall that led to a living room.
Smaller rooms were sometimes built behind the living room.
Behind those was usually a small, outdoor kitchen, with branches for a
roof. The branches allowed the
cooking smoke to escape. Stairs
often led to a flat roof where families worked, socialized and slept in the hot
summer.
Egyptian houses contained very little furniture.
Woven mats, small tables, stools and wooden beds with carved wooden
headrests were the furnishings of the common Egyptians.
How Do We Know That?
Many Egyptian tombs contain models of clay houses with farmyards in the
front. The model houses were put in
tombs to provide the deceased with food and shelter in the Afterworld.
A New Kingdom craftsman’s house was excavated at Deir
el Medina. It had four small rooms
and a backyard cooking area.
Top of Page
Some images on this page are © 2000-2001 www.arttoday.com.