Urbanism in Ancient Egypt

Although ancient Egypt was once described as a “civilization without cities,” contrary archaeological evidence has mounted as increasing numbers of settlement sites have been surveyed and excavated. Settlement archaeology began taking off in Egyptology in the 1970s, and was manifested particularly in the innovative research projects at El-Amarna, Elephantine, and Hierakonpolis, amongst other sites. These programs were partly designed to answer the question of what we know about ancient Egyptian cities, towns, and villages apart from their architectural details.

Ancient cities were unique in deriving a substantial portion of their income from their rural hinterland. As such, a broad-based model can take as its basis that a city is a unit of hierarchical settlement performing specialized tasks with an interactive hinterland network.

Developmental differences in urbanization, as expressed through evolving nature and functions, are the underlying premise of Wilson's claim that ancient Egypt did not possess cities until the New Kingdom. Wilson's biological metaphor assumes what Kemp has termed “an intuitive appreciation of culture in which archaeology has little place,” and narrowly defines the concept of urbanism on the basis of Mesopotamian size and style.

Wilson's evaluation does not differ fundamentally from the rationale presented for the development of Egyptian settlements by Helck in his Handbuch der Orientalistik. Both models are based on varying Egyptian religious texts from different periods and an interpretative approach that excludes towns due to the “spiritual” foundations of Egyptian society.

The problem with using the religious Pyramid and Coffin texts to inform on the nature and degree of urbanism, per Wilson and Helck, is that the ancient Egyptian designations for their own settlements tends to be overlooked. There was no distinction made in the Old Kingdom between towns and other settlement forms.

A different model has been proposed by Hassan, who postulates that the ideological and social context of agriculture and trade differed from the mercantile economies of the preindustrial Middle Ages in Europe. Thus, these activities may be reflected in a territorial state spatial organization, with settlements hierarchical in character tending toward activity boundaries being defined, and the activities themselves becoming the domain of specialists. Thus activities would be focal in nature, designed to take advantage of the scaled settlement patterns relating the city to its hinterland, and to minimize the fluctuations in agricultural yield, caused by the unpredictability of the Nile flood levels, through food transportation networks.

Hassan's definition of “capital cities,” referring to national capitals (for example, Memphis and Thebes), “town” to nome capitals, and “village” to rural settlements, is applicable to later dynastic Egypt. However, his model fails to demonstrate their appropriateness for both late Predynastic (Nagada I–III) and Early Dynastic Egypt. Hassan discretely broaches this problem when stating that a structure of 22 nomes was fixed by Fifth Dynasty times; however, nome boundaries were mobile. Because his model for the spacing of settlements is dependent upon population estimates generalized over the time span of dynastic [Page 2259]Egypt, and a hierarchical structure of administrative and redistributive sizes for settlements, its inherent inflexibility renders it problematic for the developing nucleated city-states of the predynastic, and the evolving manifestations of the territorial Pharaonic State.

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