Above we see three of the four long North-south running rooms visible at the bottom of the satellite image of Building D below.

On the right, we see the doorway into an east-west corridor dividing those rooms from three more at the south. The whole structure is sturdily built, finely plastered, with sober stone decoration at its doors.

It is interesting that buildings B, C, and D seem to relate to each other around a possible open communal space that is separated from the church.

This and other aspects of the spatial configuration as it seems to emerge so far were discussed in Brenningmeyer and McNally's paper (see abstracts), now outdated.

It is too soon to reach any solid conclusions before until the forthcoming publications of detailed plans, but not to raise questions and suggest methods of approach.

This building was by its excavator, Mahmoud ali Mohammed, and Peter Grossmann in 1991. Grossmann included a fuller description in his 2001 volume (see Bibliography).

It was first considered a dormitory, later a granary, andmore recently once again a dormitory. the relatively few, long large rooms differ from the small cells Shenute seems to require. By the time Justinian mandated that monks live in dormitories, this monastery would have been unlikely to obey.We do not know how many did.

Philip Sellew has tentatively identified this with the "dispensary called the place of service" for the monks' food that Bentley Layton has found mentioned in texts (Sellew 2002, Layton 2002, 33; 2003 (for the last, see abstracts). This identification accords with its refined architecture, and its prominent position on the site.