Page:A History of Art in Ancient Egypt Vol 2.djvu/51

The Egyptian House. 29 Solar Disc. In this part of the city the ruins of large houses with spacious courts are to be found. There is, moreover, on the western side of the main street a building which Prisse calls the palace, in which a forest of brick piers, set closely together, may, perhaps, have been constructed in order to raise the higher floors above the damp soil. This question cannot, however, be decided in the present state of our information. The southern quarter of the city was inhabited by the poor. It contains only small houses, crowded together, of which nothing but the outer walls and a few heaps of rubbish remain. In the case of Thebes we cannot point out, even to this slight extent, the arrangement of the city. We cannot tell where the palaces of the king and the dwellings of the great were Fig. II. — Plan of a part of the city at Tell-el-Amarna ; from Prisse. situated. All that we know is that the city properly speaking, the Diospolis of the Greeks, so called on account of the great temple of Amen which formed its centre, was on the right bank of the river ; that its houses were massed round those two great sacred inclosures which we now call Karnak and Luxor ; that it was intersected by wide streets, those which united Karnak and Luxor to each other and to the river being bordered with sphinxes. These great streets were the Spofioi of the Greek writers ; others they called ^aaii/n] pvfii], king's street.^ The blocks of houses which bordered these great causeways were intersected by narrow lanes.^ The quarter on the left bank of the river was a sort of ^ See Brugsch-Bey's topographical sketch of a part of ancient Thebes in the Rrciie archeologique of M. E. Revillout, 1880 (plates 12 and 13). See, in the Rciiie arc/uologique, the Donnces geographiques et topographiques