It is difficult for us to catch a glimpse of the detail of the internal arrangements:  we find, however, mention made of large halls “resembling the hall of Atumu in the heavens,” whither the king repaired to deal with state affairs in council, to dispense justice and sometimes also to preside at state banquets.  Long rows of tall columns, carved out of rare woods and painted with bright colours, supported the roofs of these chambers, which were entered by doors inlaid with gold and silver, and incrusted with malachite or lapis-lazuli.*

* This is the description of the palace of Amon built by Ramses III.  Ramses II. was seated in one of these halls, on a throne of gold, when he deliberated with his councillors in regard to the construction of a cistern in the desert for the miners who were going to the gold-mines of Akiti.  The room in which the king stopped, after leaving his apartments, for the purpose of putting on his ceremonial dress and receiving the homage of his ministers, appears to me to have been called during the Ancient Empire “Pi-dait” —­“The House of Adoration,” the house in which the king was worshipped, as in temples of the Ptolemaic epoch, was that in which the statue of the god, on leaving the sanctuary, was dressed and worshipped by the faithful.  Sinuhit, under the XIIth dynasty, was granted an audience in the “Hall of Electrum.”

The private apartments, the “akhonuiti,” were entirely separate, but they communicated with the queen’s dwelling and with the harem of the wives of inferior rank.  The “royal children” occupied a quarter to themselves, under the care of their tutors; they had their own houses and a train of servants proportionate to their rank, age, and the fortune of their mother’s family.  The nobles who had appointments at court and the royal domestics lived in the palace itself, but the offices of the different functionaries, the storehouses for their provisions, the dwellings of their employes, formed distinct quarters outside the palace, grouped around narrow courts, and communicating with each other by a labyrinth of lanes or covered passages.  The entire building was constructed of wood or bricks, less frequently of roughly dressed stone, badly built, and wanting in solidity.  The ancient Pharaohs were no more inclined than the Sultans of later days to occupy palaces in which their predecessors had lived and died.  Each king desired to possess a habitation after his own heart, one which would not be haunted by the memory, or perchance the double, of another sovereign.  These royal mansions, hastily erected, hastily filled with occupants, were vacated and fell into ruin with no less rapidity:  they grew old with their master, or even more rapidly than he, and his disappearance almost always entailed their ruin.  In the neighbourhood of Memphis many of these palaces might be seen, which their short-lived masters had built for eternity, an eternity which did not last longer than the lives of their builders.*