* 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. Sinûhît, under
the XIIth dynasty, was granted an audience in the "Hall of
Electrum."

The private apartments, the "âkhonûiti," 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 _employés_, 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