Lecture 4

The Egyptian "City"

Egypt and Mesopotamia were alike in many ways, but there were important differences. These differences were partly caused by the physical environment, but these found expression in ways that had political, religious, and physical manifestations. Thus, in most ways ancient Egypt was a land without real cities--defying common assumptions about the necessity of urban life for civilization.

A. The Physical Environment and Differences between Mesopotamia and Egypt

1. Both Egypt and Mesopotamia were riverine civilizations, but the Nile was very different from the Tigris and the Euphrates.

2. The river was the source of life in both regions, but the Nile flooded slowly, predictably, and broad certain wealth to the country every year, while the Tigris and the Euphrates flooded erratically and violently, carrying away large sections of the countryside and leaving death and destruction in their wake.

3. Many scholars have explained the differences between the two cultures by reference to these different experiences of the rivers: the Egyptians were optimistic and looked forward to a happy afterlife, while the Mesopotamians were pessimistic and fatalistic with little hope for the future.

4. In the words of Lewis Mumford: "'Insecurity' and 'intimidation' were written all over the Mesopotamian record…. These practices left their impression on every part of life, in repeated acts of cruelty and violence…. Even without the incessant outbreak of war, there was an undercurrent of terrorism and sadistic punishment in such a regime, similar to that which has been resurrected in the totalitarian states of our own day, which bear so many resemblances to these archaic absolutisms. Under such conditions, the necessary co-operations of urban living require the constant application of the police power, and the city becomes a kind of prison whose inhabitants are under constant surveillance: a state not mere symbolized but effectively perpetuated by the town wall and its barred gates." (p. 83)

5. While the history of Mesopotamia was characterized by the alternation of political fragmentation and military conquest, that of Egypt was one long, scarcely broken unity of the whole Nile Valley.

B. Civilization without Cities?

1. There are many paradoxes in Egyptian history, not least concerning the issue of cities.

2. Egyptian civilization, with complex social, economic, and political organization, certainly came into being by shortly after 3000 B.C. Upper and Lower Egypt were united and the Pharaoh came to symbolize the unity of all the Nile Valley -- yet there were no true cities.

a. It is possible that there were fortified proto-cities in pre-dynastic Egypt, but these disappeared once the Pharaoh established universal control. There was a tradition that the god Ptah was a founder of cities, and the early kings of Egypt founded cities, but this apparently did not continue once the position of the king was fully established.

b. Most people were peasants who lived in villages or sprawling, imperfectly defined "suburban" sprawls along the banks of the Nile.

c. Ordinary walled cities do not seem to have been needed.

d. The Egyptians had no real outside enemies and did not fear invasions from others.

e. In addition, the Pharaoh was generally accepted as a living god and the rightful ruler of Egypt -- there was thus no need to use cities (and their walls) as a means of internal coercion and control.

3. There were "urban" centers, but these were ceremonial centers, where the cult of the Pharaohs was enacted and not real administrative or commercial centers (the primary economic base was in the agricultural village). These "cities," such as Thebes and Memphis, were filled with temples and ceremonial centers, but they were not really cities in the sense we normally mean and they did not have large permanent populations.

4. Walled cities -- of the Mesopotamian type -- seem to have emerged in the 14^th century B.C., at a time of unrest and upheaval, but they disappeared once again when stability was restored.

C. Cities of the Dead

1. Ironically, although the Egyptians did not build true cities for the living, they constructed them for the dead.

2. Egyptian belief in the afterlife is well known -- perhaps originally reserved for the Pharaoh, but then extended to his family and the aristocracy, and finally to the people as a whole.

3. The Eyptians did not build great monumental architecture in their cities, but rather in the desert for the dead.

a. This may seem odd -- and backwards -- to us, but it made sense in an Egyptian context.

b. The greatest of these monuments were, of course, the pyramids.

c. The pyramids, of course, rivaled the ziggurats and palaces of Mesopotamia in expense and in grandeur and they certainly demonstrated the power of the king; yet they served a very different purpose and they were not located in an urban context.

d. Great "metropoleis" for the dead were built -- paralleling in many ways the cities that were built for the living in other parts of the world, but they were across (i.e., west of) the Nile in the land of the dead, while the living spent their time in a non-urban setting.

5. Apparently the Egyptians did not have cities, but does that mean that we should change the definition of cities in order to include the Egyptian situation?

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