First street · Croisée

The north palacea house for a queen, then for a princess — with feeding troughs carved with oxen and a garden watered from a well nobody has found the bottom of

The road comes in from the north, and the first thing on it that is not a wall is this: an isolated rectangle, set a little back from the line of the road and facing west toward the river. It was cleared in 1923 and 1924 and looked at again in the nineties. It is arranged around one long open court, with a throne room at the far end and, on the north side, a garden — a real one, sunk below the level of the rest, with a row of tree pits along its edge and a buried limestone conduit bringing it water. The water came from a well in the middle of the inner court. They put an auger down that well and reached eight metres below the present ground without touching the bottom.

It was a woman's house. The excavators thought first of Nefertiti, then of her eldest daughter Meritaten, and now think it was built for Kiya, the other wife, and passed to Meritaten after Kiya died — the daughter's name was carved over hers, which is how you know. What was not changed was the painting. The rooms along the north side were decorated with papyrus thickets growing out of marsh water, and in the papyrus, birds, and among the birds, butterflies. A great deal of it was found still on the walls where it had been painted. I have only the descriptions, and even those are enough: it is not a palace decoration; it is the view from a window somebody wanted, brought inside because the desert outside did not have it.

On the same side, past the garden, there are stalls. Limestone feeding troughs with tethering stones, in two sizes: the larger ones in the inner room carved with oxen, the smaller ones outside carved with horned desert animals — ibex, antelope. A queen's house with a stable in it, where the mangers were decorated for the animals who ate from them. I do not know what to do with that except tell you. Somebody in the year 1340 before our era paid a carver to put an ox on a trough so that the ox would have an ox to look at.

At the front, on the road side, the entrance had two masses of brick like small pylons and a stone floor between them, and one reading of the stonework is that it was a Window of Appearance, facing west: the place where the royal family showed itself, framed, to the people on the road. A window on the road, always looking out. That is the first thing on the street, and it is a window. I did not choose that either.