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Social Change in the Fourth Dynasty: The Spatial Organization of Pyramids, Tombs, and Cemeteries Author(s): Ann Macy Roth Source: Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt, Vol. 30 (1993), pp. 33-55 Published by: American Research Center in Egypt Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40000226 . Accessed: 21/04/2011 16:10 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp. JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at . http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=arce. Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. American Research Center in Egypt is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt. http://www.jstor.org Social Change in the Fourth Dynasty: The Spatial Organization of Pyramids,Tombs, and Cemeteries Ann Macy Roth The advent of the Fourth Dynasty of phar- eantry, the new-style pyramids proclaimed his aonic Egypt marked a radical break with the absorption into the mystic symbol of the sun. first three dynasties. This break is most visible The tiny offering-temple was the principal in the new shape of the era's most substantial gesture to his human aspect.' R. Stadelmann archaeological remains, the royal pyramidsand viewed the pyramidsin more political terms, as their surrounding mortuary complexes (see monuments that both expressed and enforced fig. 1). In the Third Dynasty, royal tombs took the universal claims of royal power. The new the form of stepped pyramids, surrounded by mortuary architecture, he suggested, was a dummy buildings and enclosed in a rectangle simplification and abstraction of older forms, of high, niched walls, with its long axis north- responding to growth in that power and to south. During the reign of Snefru, royal tombs changes in cultic requirements. became true pyramids of vastly increased size, The cemeteries of officials that surrounded built at the western end of a complex of new these pyramids add yet another dimension to components and proportions, which extended the analysis. D. O'Connor has observed that, if in an east-west line from the border of the the sizes of tombs represent the comparative cultivation. power of the tomb owners, the gigantic pyra- Egyptologists have long ascribed these mids of Giza surrounded by small private tombs changes to social and religious developments. can be seen as a visual metaphor for the J. H. Breasted suggested that the increasing im- centralized organization of the Old Kingdom portance of the sun-cult of Re at Heliopolis led state, in which the immense power of the king to the adoption of a tomb nearer in shape to dwarfed and dominated the people surround- the bnbnstone associated with that cult.1 I. E. S. ing him. Edwards advocated a more direct relationship Since textual sources for the Fourth Dynasty to mortuarybeliefs, viewing the pyramid as the and the preceding period are few and enig- solidified rays of the sun and citing Pyr. 523: matic, the primarysupport for these analyses is "Heaven has strengthened for you the rays of the architecture and spatial organization of the the sun, in order that you may lift yourself to Fourth Dynasty pyramid complex itself. These heaven as the eye of Re."2 He also attributed analysesof mortuaryspace are, however, largely the new east-westaxis to an increasing solar ori- impressionistic and based on intuitive assump- entation. B. Kemp, describing the pyramid of tions about the meaning of space and architec- Meydum, suggested a change in the theological tural forms. Moreover, they are based on the and social role of the king: "In place of a tomb which celebrated the king as supreme territo- 3 Ancient a Civilization rial claimant and perpetuated his earthly pag- Barry J. Kemp, Egypt: Anatomy of (New York, 1989), 63, caption to fig. 21. R. Stadelmann, Die dgyptischenPyramiden: vom Ziegelbau J. H. Breasted, The Developmentof Religion and Thought zum Weltwunder(Mainz am Rhein, 1985), 80. in Ancient Egypt (New York, 1912), 72. David O'Connor, "Political systems and archaeological I. E. S. Edwards, The Pyramids of Egypt, rev. ed. (Har- data in Egypt: 2600-1780 B.C.," WorldArchaeology 6 (1984), mondworth, 1985), 277-78 (translation slightly modified). 19-21. 33 34 JARCE XXX (1993) Fig. 1. The StepPyramid complex,at left (afterEdwards, Pyramids of Egypt, p. 35), is the bestpreserved of the pre-Fourth dynasty mortuarycomplexes. The Fourth dynasty complexin its simplestform is representedat right by the reconstructedMey- dum pyramid complex.(The drawing here is partially based on the reconstructionof Kemp,Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, p. 63.) (Not drawn to the same scale.) examination of only a limited subset of mortu- paring quantitativemeasurements. Despite the ary architecture. Private tomb architecture and objective appearance of the results these tech- cemetery organization also changed consider- niques yield, their application often requires ably, if less abruptly, during the same period, subjectivejudgments. (It is not alwaysclear, for and this larger context has not been considered example, what constitutes a "room.")Moreover, in seeking explanations for the new architec- these techniques have principally been applied tural forms adopted by kings. to houses, and their usefulness in analyzing symbolic spaces, such as mortuary or religious is less well established. Spatial Analysis buildings, For an initial application of spatial analysis In recent years, archaeologists have increas- to early Old Kingdom mortuary architecture, ingly applied formal techniques of spatial these difficulties can be avoided by using a analysis to the interpretation of cultural re- comparative approach, relating changes in the mains. One useful concept of this type is access accessibility of mortuary architecture to the analysis,which focuses on the ease or difficulty relatively static patterns in contemporary non- with which people move through buildings and mortuaryspaces. Based loosely on the same cri- into important rooms. Techniques have been teria as the more quantitative approach, such developed that allow buildings to be more easily comparisons allow distinctively Egyptian spa- compared, including the reduction of plans to tial patterns and architectural forms to be con- "justifiedaccess maps' and formulas for com- sidered. Although this approach is explicitly 6 For details of this method, see Bob Hillier and Julienne For a survey of a variety of quantitativemethods, see Hanson, The SocialLogic of Space(Cambridge, 1984). Sally John Chapman, "SocialInequality on Bulgarian Tells and Foster,"Analysis of spatialpatterns in buildings(access analy- the Varna Problem," The Social Archaeologyof Houses, Ross sis) as an insight into social structure:examples from the Samson, ed. (Edinburgh,1990), 49-92; the following essay, Scottish Iron Age," Antiquity63 (1989), 40-50; and Henry FrankE. Brown,"Comment on Chapman:Some Cautionary Glassie, Folk Housing in Middle Virginia: a structural analysis of notes on the application of spatial measures to prehistoric historicartifacts (Knoxville, Tennessee, 1975) were among the settlements,"ibid., 93-109, points out some problems with first to apply this method to archaeologicalspaces. this approach. SOCIAL CHANGE IN THE FOURTH DYNASTY 35 subjective, it is justified by the sharpness of the buildings are mixed with or segregated from contrasts it produces. These contrasts can then older structures. Like spatial patterns in indi- be compared with the surviving inscriptional vidual buildings, spatial patterns in sites can evidence to suggest the nature of the changes suggest social characteristics, such as the de- in the system of religious and social beliefs that gree of centralized control, relationships to the underlay the new mortuary architecture. past, and the segregation of certain groups.8 The principle of access analysis that I have Such analysis has generally been applied to set- adopted here is the distinction between "open" tlements, but it also is a useful way of looking at and "closed" plans in buildings. Open buildings cemeteries. tend to be readily navigable by strangers; they can be entered and their internal easily organi- Non-mortuary Architecture: zation is The function immediately apparent. Houses and Temples and position of their important rooms are often obvious from the exterior, and the paths to This comparative analysis of spatial organiza- reach them are both short and direct. Axial and tion in mortuary and non-mortuary structures symmetrical plans tend to result in open build- is implicitly based on the assumption that there ings, as do plans with many entrances. Public was no fundamental change in the plans of or communally-used spaces often have open houses and temples between the Archaic plans, and they are especially common in com- Period and the later Old Kingdom. This as- munities where strangers are either rare or as- sumption does not conflict with any architec- sumed to be friendly, in egalitarian societies, tural remains so far excavated from the early and in cultures that place a low value on pri- period, but those remains are too few to prove vacy. Closed plans, on the other hand, separate or disprove it.
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