Known at least since the 3rd dynasty, true arches were rarely used in early Ancient Egypt. Only when the building material was mud bricks and building corbelled vaults was impractical, were true arches erected.

In Djoser's great mastaba a barrel-vault has been found. It was built with bricks wedged together and bonded from above with gravel and mortar.

In the 12th dynasty pyramid at Hawara a brick arch almost a metre thick was erected above the rock burial chamber and passages, separating and supporting the upper part of the pyramid consisting of bricks laid in sand and a limestone covering, which has completely disappeared.

It was only the Romans who succeeded in integrating arches and using them in a grand manner.

Doorways were generally built with stone lintels, though  evidence for arched doorways was found as well as for vaulted roofs made of bricks at the 12th dynasty city

Architraves are the main beams resting across the tops of the columns. In ancient Egypt no attempts were made to cover pillared halls with arches.

Corbels were widely used in stone buildings; and corbelled arches continued to be constructed a long time after the true arch had been invented. They can be found in pyramids and occasionally in temples. The use of corbelled instead of true arches limited the width that couldbe spanned, but required less dressing of stones.

In tombs and temples for the dead there were niches for offerings, the back walls of which were given the form of doors. They served as a pathway between the living and the dead by which the Ka and the other spiritual parts of the deceased could communicate with the world of the living. The nourishment that was offered to the dead, could be real food placed on an offering slab or symbolic food carved into a stela. The earlier three dimensional execution of these doors gave way to a simpler painted form during the New Kingdom.

False doors were often highly decorated and marked with the names and titles of the grave's owner. A representation of the deceased is also frequently found.

Flagpoles were often erected in pairs close to the façade of a temple or a palace wall, on either side of a gate or a window, e.g. on either side of the window of appearances shown below there are two poles with flags flying from them. They were made of fir stems which were sometimes painted. Taller than the pylons to which they were anchored they reached normally about thirty metres, though at Karnak they were twice as tall.

Stone buildings were often erected on rock surfaces. When foundations had to be laid, the building pit was first filled with water and the resulting horizontal lines were marked on the walls. The water was then removed and the pit filled with sand up to the marks. This was covered with several layers of broken rock on which the rock slabs forming walls and pillars were placed.

The pavement in the Osiris temple at Tell Tebilla was laid on a 20 cm thick layer of sand. At Karnak wall foundations never go deeper than two to three metres. At Luxor close to the river, walls were built on three layers of stone blocks each about 80 cm high and the brick foundations of the colonnades at the Ramesseum were less than two metres thick.

The relative weakness of these foundations, rising water-tables and other causes led to the collapse of most ancient buildings: The alkaline groundwater at Karnak had dissolved the sandstone base of eleven huge pillars which crumbled on the 3rd October 1899. That they had endured for so long was thanks to the virtual absence of rain, the composition of the soil and the sun which bakes the Egyptian earth above the high-water line of the Nile almost to the hardness of rock.

Friezes, sculpted or painted horizontal decorative bands rather than the Greek and Roman entablature between architrave and cornice, were occasionally used to mark the upper limit of a wall. Animals like cobras were depicted (middle picture) as were kheker signs (on the right), abstractions of knots with which plant stalks were tied to wooden frames in order to create a wall.

Monolithic square stone pillars ending in a point, obelisks were erected in honour of the sun god Re, the oldest on a natural hill north of Heliopolis. During the 5th Dynasty the obelisk became the centre of the sun temple, later they are to be found standing in pairs by temple entrances. Their tips had the form of pyramidions and seem to have been covered by gilded copper sheets or the like.

The Heliopolis obelisks measured about 20.75 metres, those at Luxor somewhat more than 23 metres. Hatshepsut's Karnak obelisk was 33 metres tall. They weighed often more than 250 tons. The biggest obelisk ever attempted was abandoned at the quarry when it cracked.

Made of granite, a rock harder than the metal tools available, obelisks had to be shaped and carved with the help of dolerite hammer stones.

Various theories of how they were erected have been proposed. They generally include an earthen ramp up which the obelisk would have been dragged base first, lowered slowly onto the foundation plate and then pulled upright.

A papyrus seems to point to the method used in lowering monuments

Insufficient foundations, earthquakes and conquerors have caused the downfall of all but two obelisks. Since Imperial Roman times they have been collector's items and many have been shipped all over the world.

Unlike floors in private homes which were never paved in Pharaonic times, temple courtyards and floors were often covered with flagstones .

Roads were, apart from a few cases which belonged to temple complexes or where heavy loads were routinely moved along them, made of compacted earth, dried almost as hard as stone by the sun.

From simple, barely adorned granite columns, pillars evolved into stone plants: trunks of palm trees and bundles of lotus plants, reeds or papyrus, often used side by side. Under Ramses II monumental forests of pillars were erected. The 5000 m² Hypostyle Hall contained 134 sandstone pillars, the tallest of which were 23 metres tall and had a diameter of 3.5 m. Because of their size, they had to be put together from half cylinders instead of the usual full cylinders. The columns were seemingly given their final shape in situ.

Pillars were either free-standing or engaged, sometimes they were purely ornamental, never more so than in the case of pillar reliefs carved into walls.

Pillars had also a symbolic role denoting stability and duration. Djed pillars, perhaps originating in posts to which ears of corn were tied, symbolized fertility. They became Osiris pillars which were the backbone of the god, supporting the sky and appeared first in Djoser's pyramid complex. Later they took the form of Osiris himself. Often the Djed pillars were just decorative without any structural importance.

New Kingdom papyriform pillars with closed or open flower capitals were symbols for the sky crossed by the path of the sun: in the early morning the flowers are still closed but then open with the progress of the sun across the sky. They can be seen in the temples at Luxor.

Thutmose erected at Karnak two pillars which were symbolic for the united Egypt: one decorated with papyrus plants denoting Lower Egypt, the other Upper Egypt's lotus.

The head of the goddess Hathor was at times depicted on round or square pillars. The entrance hall of the temple dedicated to her at Denderah had 24 pillars crowned with heads of the goddess.

Introduced during the New Kingdom, pylons were towerlike structures flanking temple entrances reminiscent of the mountains on the horizon between which the sun rose every morning. Their importance was mostly symbolic and possibly aesthetic: Linked to Isis and Nephthys they were bastions against evil, protecting the god resting in the sanctuary. They were often decorated with reliefs depicting the destruction of enemies

Unlike many modern stairs which are often lightly built of either wood or steel, ancient Egyptian stairs were generally massive affairs made of bricks [4] or, in temples, of rock. As most towns were built in the plain, there was rarely need for wide public stairs of the kind found at Kahun.

Town houses sometimes had second or third floors, which could be reached by flights of stairs built of mud bricks or wood and the flat roofs of most houses were accessible and often used for sleeping and cooking.

An extreme, symbolic form of stairs may be Djoser's step pyramid, built perhaps to facilitate the deceased king's ascent to heaven. (Only, if that was their purpose one may well wonder why this form of pyramid was abandoned)

These are often freestanding upright slabs of stone bearing inscriptions and at times reliefs. They may be commemorative, sometimes they were erected to indicate borders or boundaries. For instance, at least fourteen stelae marked the confines of Akhetaten. Stelae were placed at the southern border of Egypt with Nubia, and Thutmose is said to have left a border stela, which has never been found, in Syria.

Egyptian architecture was - with a few exceptions - based on trabeation, the post and lintel principle. This limited the covered spaces inside buildings to the width that could be bridged with the building materials used, in dwellings about three to four metres, the maximal plank length that could be cut from local wood. Ceilings exceeding this width had to be supported by posts. In temple hypostyle halls this resulted in forests of sculptured stone pillars supporting decorated architraves symbolizing the sky

Occasionally kings had to show themselves to their subjects, perform public ceremonies like the dispensing of the Gold of Honour, but generally preferred to keep their distance. A solution was the use of the window of appearance let into the façade of the palace.