Behind all the glitter of the court and official circle, with its innumerable hangers-on, there comes the great mass of the people, the farmers, the skilled workmen, the shepherds, fishers, toilers of all sorts. Of no race in the world can it be said that the conditions of its workers have been so fully depicted as of the Egyptians. On the sculptured and painted tomb-reliefs we see the workmen of almost every trade under heaven busily engaged in the prosecution of their calling. Whatever the scribe might think of the indignity of being a smith or a carpenter, his impression was confined to himself, and the great man had not the least objection to see these and a score of other common occupations pictured on the walls of his “eternal habitation.” But while the outward aspect of these callings is thus fully represented, so that it might be possible to produce a handbook of the Egyptian crafts, we are not so well informed as to the environment in which these wonderfully skilled workmen spent their lives, what were the conditions of their service, the manner of their housing, and the question of whether their lot was a happy one or not. Petrie’s excavations at Kahun have given us the almost complete plan of an Old Kingdom workmen’s town, where the skilled masons who were building the pyramid of Senusert II were housed. Though this is only a temporary town, we may probably take its conditions as more or less typical of those which prevailed for the artisan class in the Old Kingdom. The houses are of all sizes, ranging from four rooms to sixty, the larger houses being, no doubt, those of the overseers and clerks of works. The streets are narrow, varying from 11 feet to 15 feet wide, and having a drain down the middle of each. The simplest type of small house has an open court opposite the entrance, a common room on one side, and two storerooms on the other, with a stair leading up to the roof. The larger class of artisan’s house has a court, four rooms opening off it, and five other rooms dependent on the main rooms. On the whole, one would imagine that the housing conditions were not so very bad; though certainly the houses were too crowded together. The average artisan’s house of the present day has not the number of rooms which were possessed by the pyramid mason of four thousand years ago, though his advantages in other respects are considerable. [Illustration: 30. XIXth DYNASTY RELIEF-WORK, TEMPLE OF RAMSES II, LUXOR.]