Wherever the upper floors still remain standing, they reproduce the ground-
floor plan with scarcely any differences. These upper rooms were reached by
an outside staircase, steep and narrow, and divided at short intervals by
small square landings. The rooms were oblong, and were lighted only from
the doorway; when it was decided to open windows on the street, they were
mere air-holes near the ceiling, pierced without regularity or symmetry,
fitted with a lattice of wooden cross bars, and secured by wooden shutters.
The floors were bricked or paved, or consisted still more frequently of
merely a layer of rammed earth. The rooms were not left undecorated; the
mud-plaster of the walls, generally in its native grey, although
whitewashed in some cases, was painted with red or yellow, and ornamented
with drawings of interior and exterior views of a house, and of household
vessels and eatables (fig. 10). The roof was flat, and made probably, as at
the present day, of closely laid rows of palm-branches covered with a
coating of mud thick enough to withstand the effects of rain. Sometimes it
was surmounted by only one or two of the usual Egyptian ventilators; but
generally there was a small washhouse on the roof (fig. 9), and a little
chamber for the slaves or guards to sleep in. The household fire was made
in a hollow of the earthen floor, usually to one side of the room, and the
smoke escaped through a hole in the ceiling; branches of trees, charcoal,
and dried cakes of ass or cow dung were used for fuel.

[Illustration: Fig. 10.--Wall-painting in a Twelfth Dynasty house. Below is
a view of the outside, and above a view of the inside of a dwelling.
Reproduced from Plate XVI. of _Illahûn, Kahun, and Gurob_, W.M.F. Petrie.]

[Illustration: Fig. 11.--View of mansion from the tomb of Anna, Eighteenth
Dynasty.]

The mansions of the rich and great covered a large space of ground. They