Another Petrie 1889 photograph of Lahun shows a rectangular limestone slab set in the corner of a room with plastered mudbrick walls. The slab has raised border and short feet to raise it off the ground at the corners and midway along the long side and at its center is a circular hollow. Petrie captioned the image “stone tray for water jar and dishes.” The jar emplacement itself implies only that liquid was
Figure 2.20 Stone ablution (?) table at the corner of a house in the late Middle Kingdom town near modern al-Lahun, as it was in 1890, petrie photograph no.957. © of the petrie Museum of Egyptian Archaeology, UCL.
Present, we cannot in fact be sure whether the jars contained water, milk, or wine, or whether the slab was for special or for regular use. The square pools in other parts of the house might be for washing hands before eating or feet before proceeding into rooms which were kept cleaner. Fossibly, the jar on the limestone slab served a similar purpose, and the long table space on either side was for smaller basins for water poured from a central jar. Perhaps, though, the water or other liquid was for drinking, and the long table was for food, offerings for or from guests, or even for forces protecting the house—deities or ancestors. From the period of the houses 1850-1750 Bc, there is little other evidence, and we need comparison with other times and places to suggest possible functions. However, the town plan does provide us with a spatial context, and that gives us some idea of the role for the space. Carla Gallorini notes the only stone rectangle marked in the corner of a room on the Petrie plans, at the north end of a double-columned hall, in one of the nine palatial mansions on the site (in Quirke 2011, 782). This takes us to the wealthiest end of living at Lahun 1850-1750 Bc, a social context where the word elite has some meaning. The mansion floor plans follow a recurring pattern, where functions can be assigned to each space—in contrast to the unpredictable multifunctional use of rooms in the more modest houses on Abu island (see section “Houses at Abu 1800 Bc”). Only that one slab is recorded, but a number of other rooms, all in the palatial mansions, had square pools made up of separate limestone slabs at the center of halls with three to ten columns. According to the interpretation of the mansions by Manfred Bietak, the rectangular slab lies within the sphere of the main person in the house, rather than within the subsidiary suites for other family or staff members, or within the economic production or storage quarters of the house (Figure 2.20).
Figure 2.21 Offering stands sculpted as figurines, found in 1889 at the late Middle Kingdom townsite near modern al-Lahun, during the clearance supervised by W. petrie. From W. petrie, Jllahun, Kahun, Ourab, David Nutt, London, 1891, pl.6.
We can, then, use the slab to set in motion a point of meeting between different lives, elite and subaltern, within more formal context outside the temple. The slab house is in the quarter farthest from the Valley Temple, but on this side of the site, there is a clear view across the desert to the pyramid of the king a kilometer to the west. The nearest formal place of offerings might be the building in the square below the House af the Mayor, but its identity as a temple is not certain. If not, to join rituals of offering or festival at the Valley Temple, someone in this house would need to proceed along the main east-west town street, which has a 55 cm drainage gulley to take some of the winter rain or the liquid refuse, and either down a north-south street to a canal waterfront (area not preserved) or through the only preserved gateway of the town, with brick-paved road down onto the desert to the east of the site.
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