Free Think Like an Egyptian by Barry Kemp

father’s absence. Most of the others were women, including Hekanakht’s mother, and his new wife (most likely he was widowed) who was a source of conflict (see no. 66, “To love”). Other records of households, urban rather than rural, show smaller numbers, in single figures, with far fewer children than one might expect, perhaps a consequence of a high infant mortality rate (see no. 78, “Child”). Many households made themselves larger with servants or slaves. We do not know whether these servants slept in corners of the house or had places of their own.
    As in other traditional cultures, cattle, which were too valuable to leave out at night, would share the collection of buildings that made up the house. In the Tale of Two Brothers (c. 1200 BC) the innocent and unmarried younger brother does all the heavy work, brings the cattle home at night, and after serving his elder brother and wife with food, goes off to sleep among the cattle in a stable that was part of the house compound. This harmonious picture is destroyed by the elder brother’s wife who tries to seduce the younger brother and, when rejected by him, accuses him of attempted rape. It is the cattle who warn the younger brother of the presence of the elder brother waiting behind the door of the house to kill him.
    The word “house” also meant lineage. To its enemies in the civil war of the 1st Intermediate Period, the kings of the north were “the house of Khety,” named after the founder. It designated institutions. “The house of silver” was the Treasury, “the house of life” was the place of learning where manuscripts were studied and copied (see no. 82, “Scribal kit”), and “the house of Amun” included the temple’s extensive estates. Combining “house” with a word for “great” created the hieroglyphic group for “great house,” pr ( per-aa ), signifying the king’s residence. In time the phrase became a polite way of referring to the king without naming him. Taken up by the compilers of the Old Testament the word has given us, via Hebrew, “Pharaoh.”

27.
    DOOR
     
     
     
     
    The hieroglyph depicts a single door leaf with its characteristic wooden strengthening bars on the inside surface. Egyptian doors were always relatively tall and narrow, rotating on a lower wooden pivot set into a pivot block in the floor of the doorway, and kept vertical by an upper pivot held within a simple casing in the lintel. House doors were normally a single leaf, but in grander settings—the front door of a rich man’s house or the main entrance to a temple—they came as pairs.
    Doors allowed for privacy and helped to keep out bad weather. To look after the main door to a large property a doorkeeper was hired. Although the title was lowly, it was still one a man could use as a mark of status. Doors secured storerooms against theft. Instead of locks, Egyptians had only simple sliding carved wooden bolts. They sought security by winding string either between the ends of a bolt across a double-leaf door or, when the door was of a single leaf, between a bolt and a peg fixed to the door jamb. A mud sealing was then applied over the string, stamped with a distinctive design from a personal seal (see no. 83, “Cylinder seal”). The security of storerooms could be monitored and written about in reports. Transferred to the full daily temple order of service, the unsealing and opening of the doors of the various shrines became a significant act of ritual.
    At a deeper religious level, doors were also seen as a means of access and closure. With their surrounding portals they marked stages on a journey through the imagined realm of the Otherworld. The dead faced a sequence of 21 doors manned by doorkeepers who had to be addressed by their correct names before they would grant admission: “Make way for me, for I know you, I know your name, and I know the name of the god who guards you.” A set of 12 similar portals, one for each hour, marked