Neighborhood to National Network: Pyramid Settlements of Giza (original) (raw)
A twenty-hectare swath of Old Kingdom 4th Dynasty settlement that central authorities laid out at the low, southeastern base of the Giza Plateau as housing and infrastructure for building pyramids shows distinct components that reflect how they mobilized labor into collective action for building on a colossal scale through already existing social bonds and home-based fellowships from districts, villages and neighborhoods. Correlation between this architectural footprint, builders' graffiti, and recently discovered papyrus day logs with district signs suggests links to larger national networks. Ensconced alongside the major Nile port of its time, community members served in both ships' crews and work gangs with links to broader interregional networks. It is possible that immigrants from source countries who specialized in procurement and transport of exotic products contributed to ethnic diversity in the distinct components of "downtown Egypt." Brought together in a central settlement much larger and denser than any at home, each occupant experienced an exponential increase in social interactions. But we see hints that, as authorities multiplied social clusters for collective action and established procurement networks of broad spatial range, they preserved home-based fellowships. It may have been true for downtown Egypt at the pyramids that, regardless of a city's size, everyone lived in villages and neighborhoods.
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2 Neighborhood to National Network: Pyramid Settlements of Giza
Archeological Papers of the American Anthropological Association, 2019
A twenty-hectare swath of Old Kingdom 4th Dynasty settlement that central authorities laid out at the low, southeastern base of the Giza Plateau as housing and infrastructure for building pyramids shows distinct components that reflect how they mobilized labor into collective action for building on a colossal scale through already existing social bonds and home-based fellowships from districts, villages and neighborhoods. Correlation between this architectural footprint, builders' graffiti, and recently discovered papyrus day logs with district signs suggests links to larger national networks. Ensconced alongside the major Nile port of its time, community members served in both ships' crews and work gangs with links to broader interregional networks. It is possible that immigrants from source countries who specialized in procurement and transport of exotic products contributed to ethnic diversity in the distinct components of "downtown Egypt." Brought together in a central settlement much larger and denser than any at home, each occupant experienced an exponential increase in social interactions. But we see hints that, as authorities multiplied social clusters for collective action and established procurement networks of broad spatial range, they preserved home-based fellowships. It may have been true for downtown Egypt at the pyramids that, regardless of a city's size, everyone lived in villages and neighborhoods.
Egypt and the Levant, 2017
The cemeteries of the southern Egyptian Nile Valley have for a long time taken up a major role in the reconstruction of the emergence of social complexity during the 5 th and 4 th millennia and of the early territorial state of Pharaonic Egypt. Whilst this data is very substantial and highly important, it has overshadowed other DUFKDHRORJLFDO LQIRUPDWLRQ WKDW LV HTXDOO\ VLJQL¿cant and that actually challenges certain interpretations deriving only from mortuary data. This paper aims at considering archaeological evidence primarily derived from a number of settlements and from material culture of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic and until the Early Dynastic Periods to better balance and contextualise the mortuary evidence of these periods. It will discuss and interpret these on the background of current scholarship on material culture, interregional exchange and social complexity and will especially seek to answer questions concerning the socioeconomic context of institutionalised leadership and its potential links to early kingship. The paper will also address the high degree of variability in archaeological data and thereby contribute to a growing scholarly consensus that Egypt's path to civilisation and statehood followed a number of different, often unrelated, trajectories within a regionally variable cultural system in the Egyptian Nile Valley.
The Archaeology of Urbanism in Ancient Egypt
2016
In this book, Nadine Moeller challenges prevailing views on Egypt's non-urban past and argues for Egypt as an early urban society. She traces the emergence of urban features during the Predynastic Period up to the disintegration of the powerful Middle Kingdom state (c.3500–1650 BC). This book offers a synthesis of the archaeological data that sheds light on the different facets of urbanism in ancient Egypt. Drawing on evidence from recent excavations as well as a vast body of archaeological data, this book explores the changing settlement patterns by contrasting periods of strong political control against those of decentralization. It also discusses households and the layout of domestic architecture, which are key elements for understanding how society functioned and evolved over time. Moeller reveals what settlement patterns can tell us about the formation of complex society and the role of the state in urban development in ancient Egypt.
Labor and the Pyramids The Heit el-Ghurab “Workers Town” at Giza
This article surveys the so-called “Workers Town” at the Heit el- Ghurab in relation to information from Old Kingdom texts, art, and archaeology with the goal of learning more about the status of its inhabitants in the organization of labor for the building of the anomalously gigantic pyramids of the 4th Dynasty. In the first part I ask: Do indicators of an abundance of meat, the presence of hunted game, and Levantine “luxury” imports suggest good treatment of common workers, or does this material hint that the occupants enjoyed a higher status than common workers and that the HeG hosted functions other than a barracks for workers? In the second part I pivot to a related question: If, for building the Giza pyramids, central authorities required extremely large numbers of people of a lesser status than the HeG occupants, did they use foreign captives or native corvée?
I examine the bottom-up role of villages in low population density Old Kingdom Egypt, and later ancient Egypt, against the top-down, planned, and centrally controlled Heit el-Ghurab urban site at Giza, which has been interpreted as infrastructure for pulsing people from provinces, towns, and villages through royal pyramid building works at the emerging core of the Egyptian state.
From Microcosm to Macrocosm. Individual households and cities in Ancient Egypt and Nubia, 2018
Recent fieldwork at the two major settlement sites in southern Egypt have provided new data concerning their respective foundations and long-term developments during the 3rd millennium BC. While both towns gained the status of provincial capitals during the early Old Kingdom, their initial settlement and long-term evolution show some interesting differences but also share many commonalties. Those developments seem to be related to significant changes in the floodplain regime and the course of the Nile river but there are also indications that more general trends, for example a population increase linked to the establishment of a local elite and a dynamic and sustainable regional economy, played a role in the sudden expansion of these sites at the end of the Old Kingdom. The archaeological fieldwork conducted by the Oriental Institute, University of Chicago, has focused on specific areas of these two settlements that had been founded directly on the natural bedrock constituting newly established settlement quarters at different stages of their development. At Tell Edfu, the Old Kingdom town gradually expanded northwards and westwards during the Old Kingdom making use of the increasingly flood-free zone, which can be seen by the newly excavated settlement quarter dating to the late 5th Dynasty that was situated less than 20m to the much later Ptolemaic temple. Further expansion of the town occurred during the very end of the Old Kingdom / early First Intermediate Period (c. 2200 BC), a time that has usually been associated with political and economic crises which might have been triggered by the effects of a short time climate change. By this time, the town had reached its maximum northern and western limits, which remained relatively stable for centuries to come. The ancient city at Dendara has much older roots dating back at least to the late Predynastic period but it also saw a major expansion to the east of the Roman temple enclosure during the late Old Kingdom/First Intermediate Period transition, which was inhabited until the early Middle Kingdom. The new fieldwork conducted at both sites offers a glimpse of the organisation of the new town quarters in previously unsettled areas. These two examples of growing urban centres at the end of the 3rd millennium BC are especially interesting since this particular time frame corresponds to a politically troubled period that led to a fragmented state with multiple power centres. However, from an urban perspective, cities in southern Egypt seem to demonstrate a true resilience in a time of relative prosperity and expansion.
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