When Sesostri II decided to move the entrance to his tomb to confuse and discourage the ill-intentioned ones, the workers for the construction were settled in an adjacent village called Hotep Senusert.
It was Petrie who, confusing it with the name Lahum, called it later Kahum. Time has cancelled these urban settlements, built mostly with raw bricks. Anyway Egypt presented walled cities of different extension, occupied by functionaries, farmers and craftsmen. Some cities were built in particular areas for a precise reason as the ones built to accommodate the Egyptians busy in the construction of the buildings and funeral complexes.
The most ancient examples of a city for the workers are, concerning the Ancient Reign, the settlements near Giza, followed by Kahum for the Middle Reign and by Deir el-Medina, that was built during the New Reign, the epoch to which even the city Amarna goes back to. Kahum was built around 1895 BC, and must have been adjacent to the pharaoh’s temple in the valley. The worker village was surrounded by city walls and inside it there was a raised area called “acropolis” by Petrie.
Here there was an important building that dominated the whole town and that probably belonged to a supervisor or to the sovereign himself that turned it into his temporary residence when once in while, he visited the village, maybe to control the works on his funeral complex.
The plan of the city had a very regular scheme. It had a rectangular shape, surrounded by brick walls and inside it was organized in two sections, an east one and a west one.
In the west one there were around two-hundred houses for the workers and a road went along the area dividing it in two, dividing itself in many paths with right angles. Besides the workers’ houses there were the ones for the functionaries.
Along the northern wall there were five houses of remarkable sizes and in the southern side other three have been found. At the south of the acropolis, near the dividing wall, there were the warehouses and some groups of houses.
Behind the southern palaces five streets branched off which led to the workers’ houses. In each house there were seven small rooms.
To the east of the southern palaces there were other workers’ houses, of smaller sizes, with only four rooms. Even a stone canal was found that went along the middle of the street and that probably was necessary for the drainage of it.
The laborers’ houses were one beside the other and the façade was toward the street. The roofs were made by girders covered with hay and mud, the vault ceilings were in bricks and the portals were arched.
The functionaries’ houses, in difference with the workers’ ones, had great rooms.
There were up to seventy rooms among which the kitchen, warehouses, courtyards with columns and tubs.
When the funerals complex was finished, Kahum changed from a worker village to the city of the pyramid, inhabited by men who cared for the activities concerning the king’s cult, as functionaries and priests who lived there with their families. Kahun was active not only in the time of Sesostri II but also in the New Reign under Amenofi III.
Later it was covered by the desert sand, but many papyruses written in hieratic have remained and have given an idea of the everyday life inside the city.