Trajectories of Urbanization in the Nile Valley and Delta in the 4th Millennium BC: Hierakonpolis and Tell el-Farkha in Comparative Perspective

Abstract

One of the main foci of comparative studies on ancient societies deals with urban dynamics and, in particular, with initial urbanization processes and their concomitance with the transformations that lead to the emergence of state dynamics. Within this context, we will analyze here the evidence about two nuclei that have provided a large amount of information on the characteristics of the population nucleation on the banks of the Nile during the IV millennium BC: Hierakonpolis, in Upper Egypt, and Tell el-Farkha, in the Nile delta. We will address, first, the available evidence for both historical situations, organizing it into four major areas, related to spatial dynamics, forms of functional specialization, social differentiation, and conflict, which allow us to notice the main innovations that characterize these processes. And second, we will propose a reconsideration of the information that relates to a specific problem: the relationship between the concentration of population in urban contexts and the processes of sociopolitical hierarchization that took place within and from the urban centers. In this sense, beyond the multiple differences between the urbanization trajectories of Hierakonpolis and Tell el-Farkha in the long term, the beginnings of these processes in both nuclei have a common characteristic, which is fundamental for further transformations: the creation of a social context whose practices exceeded the limits related to the preexisting logic of social organization.