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Egyptian Civilization Town Planning Egyptian Civilization
Egyptian Civilization Town Planning Egyptian Civilization
Town Planning
Egyptian Civilization
Egyptian Civilization
• Ancient Egyptian Periods:
▫ Old Kingdom (c. 3200 – 2158 B.C.)
▫ Middle Kingdom (c. 2134 – 1786 B.C.)
▫ New Kingdom (c. 1570 – 1085 B.C.)
• Landscape
▫ Nile Valley cliffs provided a rich assortment
of building stone
Varieties include sandstone, granite, and
alluvial clay for bricks
•Egyptians commonly imitated nature
in their architecture
•In a historical sense, nature is a key
element in architecture, no matter the
culture
•Only recently has this process been
neglected
Town Planning
• The reasons for the foundation of a new settlement could
be varied: security, often combined with economics.
• The main consideration where to build was generally
proximity to a waterway and height above the floodplains.
• Adobe buildings are very vulnerable when brought in
prolonged contact with water, be it seeping groundwater or
the rising Nile. But even stone edifices are in danger of
collapsing, above all when their foundations are as flimsy
as those the Egyptians built.
• When old houses crumbled, new ones
were built on top of the debris.
• The continuity of settlement during the
millennia is one of the reasons for the
scarcity of data about ancient villages and
cities, as excavation is virtually
impossible.
Buhen
• By their very nature military
settlements are more
organized than civilian towns
which have grown organically
from villages.
• Buhen, a walled frontier town
in Lower Nubia was built during
the joint reign of Amenemhet I
and his son Senusret I. It was
probably erected at the site of
an existing trading post and its
purpose was to house the
troops who controlled the
traffic from Nubia into Egypt.
•The ramparts surrounding it may
have been built before the fortress
at the centre was constructed.
• The planned town covered an
area of 6.3 ha, including the fort
and was surrounded on three
sides by a 712 metre long, 4
metre thick brick wall with thirtytwo round bastions. Only a single
gate opening towards the western
desert has been found.
•Only a single gate opening
towards the western desert has
been found. The eastern side by
the Nile was not fortified.
City Quarters
• Generally there was little town planning, and what little there was
looked a bit like the hieroglyph for "city" with houses arranged rather
haphazardly around the crossing of two major roads. But in a number
of cases attempts at planning seem to have been made, above all
in walled cities.
• The town serving the pyramid temple complex Hotepsenusret (Kahun
or more correctly Lahun) in the Fayum was founded by Senusret II and
remained inhabited for about a century.
•It was surrounded by a brick wall
and divided into two parts by
another wall. Generally different
social classes did not live in separate
city quarters. But here there was a
rich residential area, where a handful
of palatial 60 room residences were
fifty times as big as the dwellings in
the poorer half of the city.
• The streets all over the city were laid out in approximately straight
lines. The main street was nine metres wide, as opposed to the
alleys and streets in the residential districts which were
sometimes as narrow as 1½ metres. The streets had shallow stone
channels running down the middle for drainage.