Revisiting the 'Invincible City’- Was Early Egypt ‘a civilisation without cities?’

“I dreamed in a dream of a city invincible against the attacks of the whole of the rest of the earth I dreamed that was the new City of Friends. Nothing was greater there than the quality of robust love-it led the rest; It was seen every hour in the actions of the men of the city, And in all their looks and words.”

(Walt Whitman: poem from ‘Leaves of Grass’-inspiration for the title of the University of Chicago’s December 1958 ‘City Invincible’ symposium.)

Francis Lankester PhD frankfrankly101@gmail.com

The Oriental Institute Symposium

William Albright, Mircea Eliade, Thorkild Jacobsen,

Friedrich Hayek, Helene Kantor, Karl Kraeling, Samuel

Kramer, Lewis Mumford, Karl Polyani, Keith Seele, Sol Tax,

John Wilson….

The Invincible City: Urbanism-the Nucleus of Civilisation Ancient & Modern

(Keynote speech: Prof. Mumford (Massachusetts Institute of Technology)

• Concentration of temple and palace in a formidable walled enclosure with a citadel- “which brought together relatively large numbers of men and held them together in a new pattern of relations” in a container forming a civic nucleus.

• The city accumulated, stored and transmitted power from generation to generation, bringing people together to carry out great works they could never have accomplished in villages.

• “The new ideology of power which contrasted with the preoccupation with fertility, reproduction and nature that characterised the old village with its necessarily limited ambitions.”

• The city was akin to a cell, full of pent up energy directed by a deputy of the gods (Mesopotamia) or a manifestation of the divine (Egypt).

(Kraeling & Adams 1960)

“I can’t do it, I can’t do it, I can’t do it!” (John Wilson)

• Egypt akin to a 600 mile long oasis, and therefore functionally different from a state focused on a single city.

• Above all, Egypt was an agricultural land composed of agricultural villages.

• “For nearly three thousand years until the founding of Alexandria, ancient Egypt was a major civilisation without a single major city.”

• To Wilson the term urban suggested too much of the teeming cosmopolitan service centre.

• Egyptian organism was primitive, with the living protoplasm of the hundreds of agricultural and commercial villages in sight of each other lacking a fixed ‘heart’ or ‘brain’ with the ‘capital’ shifting successively, none of Memphis, Herakleopolis, Avaris or Thebes being a large metropolis.

• By implication challenging the overwhelming view that the city was essential to the rise of the state.

Modern Historians/Archaeologists’ Reaction

• Yoffee (2008: 47) “new research shows clear urban development at Hierakonpolis, at the first capital of unified Egypt at Memphis in the late predynastic and in other cities of Upper Egypt, Abydos and Naqada.”

• Wilkinson (1999: 323) “in the light of recent excavations Egypt, even early Egypt, can no longer be considered a civilisation without cities.”

• Kemp (1977: 186) “an intuitive appreciation of culture in which archaeology has little place,” & “there can be no doubt that ancient Egypt was an urbanised society of a relatively normal type.”

Definition of a ‘city’ (especially seen in Mesopotamia)

• a relatively large, dense and permanent settlement of socially heterogeneous individuals

• high density social interaction relative to wider society

• specialised differentiation of work and 'energised crowding of people'

• a community of substantial size and population density that shelters a variety of non-agricultural specialists, including a literate elite (Wirth 1938: 8)

1) Its layout is either roughly concentric or in sectors. The urban settlement is the location of the central, or regional, centre of administration interacting with local communities-consequently, urbanism is one of the defining characteristics of complex societies and of early states in particular.

2) The town/city is also usually walled in order to offer security to those moving to it from rural areas. On the basis that differentiation, and not necessarily size, defines urbanism undifferentiated 'mega-settlements' of several thousand inhabitants found for example in the Tripolye culture would not therefore qualify as urban.

Process of State Formation?-Assuming Urbanisation

(Kemp 1987)

An Alternative to the Urban Polity/State-the ‘Rural Petty Polity’

• Early Anglo-Saxon England • Longshan culture: San Dai centre = spatially separated districts more like 'fundamentally distinct

villages' with dispersed palace, temple, tombs, workshops and servitor housing than a nucleated urban centre

• Franks • Late Iron Age Britain • Rus princedoms • Yamatai 3rd. century BC Japan (Gat 2003)

Anglo-Saxon village & elite centre (Blair 2014: 19) Iron Age Camulodunum elite centre (Davill 2010: fig. 116)

Population: Abydos Region

(after Patch 1991: 338-339)

Naqada I Naqada IId Naqada III

Population: Abydos and Naqada

Hoffman, 1987

Kemp 1987

+ Adaima, Mahasna & Armant • Adaima: est. pop. 10-30, several areas 100-400m

apart (Cruzeby et al. 2008: 301)

• Mahasna: elite structures/few dwellings (Anderson

2006)

• Armant: similar to Adaima (Buchez 2011)

• 3000 graves for whole of Pre/ Protodynastic period (Petrie &

Quibell 1896)

Hierakonpolis: ‘Settlement’ (?)

(Hierakonpolis Online)

Hierakonpolis: ‘Localities’

Hierakonpolis ‘localities’ (Hierakonpolis Online)

Earliest site-HK6 near the wadi mouth,

consisting of Naqada Ic-IIa elite burials, pottery

production and brewing and the remains of a

house at nearby HK11. The latter was developed

over time to include a perimeter fence. Large

amounts of animal dung were found, as were

spindle whorls and weaving remnants.

Despite being labelled as 'settlement' on the map,

this locality raises many questions:

“We still don't know for sure who was living

there (herders? farmers? brewers? potters?)

and why (to service the funerary cult at HK6 or

find temporary shelter in the flood season?).” (Friedman 2011)

[Hierakonpolis pop. estimate: 2,544-10,944 (Hoffman 1982)]

86

Hierakonpolis

“Considering that only a few thousand graves can be postulated for a 700 year period at Hierakonpolis, any population based on these would be absurdly small. Just how small is illustrated by a recent study of our information by Professor Fekri Hassan (personal communication). Assuming a tomb population of 3,000 and 20 years for an average age at death, and the total years encompassed by the local predynastic sequence (ca. 700), Professor Hassan produced a cemetery-based estimate of only 86 persons per generation! By using even the lowest figures (ca. 2,000) suggested by our settlement-based population estimates (Hoffman et al, 1982), Hassan is able to show that even our most generous estimates of Predynastic graves (i.e. 8047) is much too small.”

(Hoffman 1987: 187)

• Even if we assume that 20-50% of burials are missing due to destruction and under-representation of children, the resulting population figures are still low.

• If places such as Abydos/This, Hierakonpolis and Naqada were actually larger, then the ‘missing’ bodies must either a) be buried in the floodplain b) have been not been found yet c) have been destroyed d) were never formally buried e) never existed and the predynastic population must have been tiny.

• Patch discounts these citing the identification of most if not all cemeteries and the desire of ancient Egyptians from all classes strongly wishing to preserve the body during all periods.

• Cemeteries would therefore have been in the low desert, and these have been surveyed for the Predynastic period. Moreover, the words zmt and hr(t)-netjer meaning ‘cemetery’ or ‘necropolis’ both have 'desert' as an integral component.

• However, this assumes that settlements on the low desert were typically normal farming villages and that Egyptians of all classes did indeed achieve a formal burial.

• We can reconcile the low numbers of desert cemetery burials if we assume that the low desert sites referred to as 'settlements' do not constitute farming villages and that most predynastic Egyptians lived, and if they had a burial at all, were laid to rest on the floodplain. (see Lankester 2014-’The Normally Absent Dead,’ Academia.edu).

• This suggests that burial in the preserving sand was exceptional and that those people who were accorded this privilege were in some way special.

• “There is no direct evidence at all for the extent and character of floodplain settlements.......All must be inferred, although geomorphological theory would point to the likely existence of levees along the river bank and fragmentary levees further back, left over from earlier Nile meanders which might well have provided areas suitable for settlement.” (Butzer 1976)

Settlements-on low desert or on floodplain?

What were the ‘settlements’?

(Graff 2009)

Elite Desert Edge Centre & Floodplain Settlement

Assyut in the inundation pre-Aswan dam, Kemp 1987: 11

Naqada I pillared hall reconstruction & burials (Hierakonpolis Online)

• Niwt's earliest meaning is simply 'settlement,' but later is used to describe much larger sites including a city

• Dmi, from 'to land'/'arrive,' but also translated as 'village'/ 'town', was perhaps originally a mooring facility along the riverbank

• wHyt can also mean village or town, having its root in 'clan' or 'family, ' suggesting many settlements were based on an extended family

Walled Settlements?

‘Towns’ Palette (Monnier 2013: 244)

‘Bull’ Palette

First Dynasty ‘Estate’ (Monnier 2013: 254)

First Dynasty Temple enclosure (Wilkinson 1999)

State Formation Egypt-An Expanding Rural Petty Polity

Nag Hamdulab, Wadi Abu Subeira,

Protodynastic or Early Dynastic

'Following of Horus‘ (Gatto et al. 2009)

‘The tube’

Conclusions-Was Wilson Right?

• Egyptian society was ranked from an early stage

• Evidence from cemeteries show predynastic so-called ‘urban’ sites had populations in the low hundreds at most

• These sites do not display urban characteristics

• There is no evidence that they were walled

• What are usually labelled villages, towns and cities on the low desert constituted elite centres

• Therefore there never was a move of settlements on to the floodplain-they were almost certainly always located there

• Upper Egypt was a ‘rural petty state’

• From the Predynastic through the First Dynasty (Upper) Egypt was ‘a civilisation without cities’