Men rarely entered their houses except to eat and sleep; their employments or handicrafts were such as to require them for the most part to work out-of-doors.  The middle-class families owned, almost always, one or two slaves—­either purchased or born in the house—­who did all the hard work:  they looked after the cattle, watched over the children, acted as cooks, and fetched water from the nearest pool or well.  Among the poor the drudgery of the household fell entirely upon the woman.  She spun, wove, cut out and mended garments, fetched fresh water and provisions, cooked the dinner, and made the daily bread.  She spread some handfuls of grain upon an oblong slab of stone, slightly hollowed on its upper surface, and proceeded to crush them with a smaller stone like a painter’s muller, which she moistened from time to time.  For an hour and more she laboured with her arms, shoulders, loins, in fact, all her body; but an indifferent result followed from the great exertion.  The flour, made to undergo several grindings in this rustic mortar, was coarse, uneven, mixed with bran, or whole grains, which had escaped the pestle, and contaminated with dust and abraded particles of the stone.  She kneaded it with a little water, blended with it, as a sort of yeast, a piece of stale dough of the day before, and made from the mass round cakes, about half an inch thick and some four inches in diameter, which she placed upon a flat flint, covering them with hot ashes.  The bread, imperfectly raised, often badly cooked, borrowed, from the organic fuel under which it was buried, a special odour, and a taste to which strangers did not readily accustom themselves.  The impurities which it contained were sufficient in the long run to ruin the strongest teeth; eating it was an action of grinding rather than chewing, and old men were not unfrequently met with whose teeth had been gradually worn away to the level of the gums, like those of an aged ass or ox.*

* The description of the woman grinding grain and kneading dough is founded on statues in the Gizeh Museum.  All the European museums possess numerous specimens of the bread in question, and the effect which it produces in the long run on the teeth of those who habitually used it as an article of diet, has been observed in mummies of the most important personages.

Movement and animation were not lacking at certain hours of the day, particularly during the morning, in the markets and in the neighbourhood of the temples and government buildings:  there was but little traffic anywhere else; the streets were silent, and the town dull and sleepy.  It woke up completely only three or four times a year, at seasons of solemn assemblies “of heaven and earth:”  the houses were then opened and their inhabitants streamed forth, the lively crowd thronging the squares and crossways.  To begin with, there was New Year’s Day, quickly followed by the Festival of the Bead, the “Uagait.”  On the night of the