Ancient Egyptians Cool Their Homes? how...

 The wind catchers

Windcatcher on the top of Palace of Alfi Bey, 1809, via Edition-Originale.Com

A prominent feature of the ancient Egyptian house that could have helped keep it cool was a structure known in Arabic as a malqaf. While we don’t have any archaeological remains of such structures from pharaonic times, there is a depiction of some on a house in a tomb in Thebes and on a funerary papyrus in the British Museum. They consisted of a triangular-shaped windcatcher on the roof open towards the north, which drew the cooling north breeze down into the home

The Egyptians seem to have considered this natural air-conditioning method to be one of the most effective ways of cooling for millennia because when Napoleon invaded Egypt over 200 years ago, his artists drew the houses of Cairo, and nearly every single house had one. Several still exist on historical houses you can visit in Cairo today.

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The mud bricks

The ancient Egyptians built these homes from silt mixed with sand and some sort of chaff such as straw. They mixed the mud with their feet and formed bricks in wooden frames. After they laid out the bricks to dry in the sun, they would have stacked the dried bricks in layers, one on top of the other. Then they spread layers of the same mud mixture between layers to get them to hold together. In order to protect the bricks and provide a smooth surface, the walls are usually plastered with a mixture of mud and chaff, and possibly painted with a lime wash.

Egypt’s climate today is roughly the same as that in ancient Egypt. Most of the year, it is extremely dry and hot. The low humidity along with the lack of rain, meant that mud houses could stand the test of time. Moreover, mud is a poor conductor of heat, so as long as the house was kept closed up during the hotter part of the day, it was less affected by the hot weather outside. Likewise, in the winter, mudbrick homes are warmer.