This model of an Egyptian house has more than one room (Louvre Museum, Paris)
In the earliest days of the kingdom of Egypt, about 4000-3500 BC, Egypt was still divided into the two countries of Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. Even so long ago, most people already lived in houses built out of mud-brick, as they would throughout Egyptian history, and as many people in Egypt still do today.
What is an Egyptian mastaba?
This was so long ago that Egyptian architects couldn’t really build anything much more complicated than a house yet. The only other thing they built (that we know about) was tombs called mastabas. A mastaba was a small, low stone building to put a dead person in. So it was like a house for the dead.
Early Egyptian mastaba tomb at Giza, Egypt
Mastabas and mummies
Egypt’s dry climate naturally preserved dead people’s bodies as mummies, and naturally Egyptians thought that if people’s bodies were going to stick around after death, they’d need houses to live in. That’s what a mastaba is. Though actually, once you put a body in a mastaba instead of burying them in the sand, they didn’t mummify themselves so well. That’s what drove the Egyptians to develop their own ways to mummify bodies.
Learn by doing: The Afterlife
Find out about the Pyramids
More about Predynastic Egypt
Bibliography and further reading about Egyptian architecture:
Pyramid, by David Macaulay (1982). His architectural drawings are great, and his explanations are simple and clear. Easy reading.
Eyewitness: Pyramid, by James Putnam (2000). Easy reading. Good photographs.
The Art and Architecture of Ancient Egypt (Yale University Press Pelican History of Art), by William Stevenson Smith and William Kelly Simpson (revised edition 1999). Standard college textbook.
There were no mastabas during the Predynastic Period. There were grave mounds. The first mastabas were built during the Archaic Period.
I’m sorry, but I think there were. Wikipedia’s on my side, for a start: “The mastaba was the standard type of tomb in pre-dynastic and early dynastic Egypt for both the pharaoh and the social elite. ” Where are you getting your information? I’d be happy to check your source.