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Text | Dalton notes
Edit | Dalton notes
Due to its prominent appearance, the settlement wall attracted the attention of archaeologists and historians very early.
In any site and its archaeological report, it is difficult to ignore these thick walls that surround the entire settlement, or at least its main parts. Petrie was one of the first Egyptologists to set his sights on these walls.
In his description of the ruins of El-Lahun, he wrote: "The outer walls of the town are connected in a straight line with the façade of the temple.
I suddenly realized that this place must have been the town of the pyramid builders..." Although he did not discuss the walls themselves, his reports were always faithful to the way they were laid out and how they related to the surrounding buildings.
This makes these reports outdated to this day. However, as mentioned earlier, the study of settlement walls has long been on the fringes of academic research.
They are often research tools for studying topics such as ancient Egyptian urbanization, building technology, or military defense strategies, rather than the subjects themselves.
For the study of urbanization and the origin of the state, the appearance of the wall is of great significance.
It is one of the basic means of separating settlements from their surroundings, and its establishment marks the emergence of a regional manager or group of managers capable of controlling a considerable size of manpower and materials. Despite sporadic opposition, the presence of walls is often seen as one of the criteria by which a settlement is urbanized.
Scholars including Bruce Trigger, Barry Kemp and Nadine Moeller have largely agreed on this point.
Trigg believes that the settlement wall not only serves a defensive function, but also gives its inhabitants a sense of common community. As a symbolic architectural tool to divide the internal and external spaces and transmit the authority and influence of central or local rulers, the settlement wall undoubtedly influences and even shapes the specific collective memory of the settlement residents for the town to which they belong.
Kemp argues that the advent of the wall marks a fundamental change in the nature of settlements, "from disorderly, low-density settlements to high-density towns with brick walls." ”
He also summarized two different urbanization models from the differences in the layout and appearance of the settlement walls. In his view, the irregular urban walls may represent a spontaneous, locally driven urbanization process.
Geographical environmental factors and the religious and other social life needs of local residents were more taken into account in the construction of the walls, resulting in the irregular external contours of these walls. Conversely, walls that are regularly shaped and laid out that clearly ignore local religious and geological conditions represent a state-led pattern of urbanization.
At the same time, he also stressed that as the dominant forces of settlements adjust in different eras, these two different types of urbanization growth patterns may alternate in those long-used settlements and be reflected in buildings such as walls.
Mill further expanded the value of walls in settlement taxonomy.
She juxtaposed the walls with the basic units of settlements, such as temples, public cemeteries, administrative institutions and production areas, and regarded their existence, size, and basic form as important criteria for dividing settlements of different levels and nature, such as capital cities, provincial capital cities, villages and fortresses.
Herbert Fairman analyzes the evolution of the function of walls in the course of urban development from the perspective of settlement ministries. He observed changes in the relative position of the walls and dwellings in the workers' village of the Medina at different times. And found that as the size of the village expanded, the residential area gradually broke through the limitations of the wall.
Those that are beyond the walls are usually smaller in size than the parts within the walls. This undoubtedly shows the evolution of the function of the wall of the Medina Workers' Village in the course of the development of the town. From the restriction and protection of the inhabitants of the interior to a symbol of hierarchy.
Fairman also noted that the Egyptians continued to build new defensive forts on the southern border, despite the lifting of the Nubian military threat. However, "the walls of these new forts always appeared as regular rectangles or squares, with unnecessary buttresses attached at regular intervals. "It shows that their military-strategic value has been significantly reduced.
In the study of military history, defensive walls have also long attracted the attention of military historians. In the article "Frontier Fortresses of Ancient Egypt", Somers Clarke describes the traditional fortress defense system of ancient Egypt.
It usually consists of a double wall, a ditch between the walls, and square battlements attached to the wall. He also gave a brief description of the geographical location of nine forts, including Ikkur, Buhen and Semna, and the layout of military fortifications such as walls. Attached are archaeological plans of these forts.
From the perspective of military construction technology, the differences between different terrain areas of the same urban defense construction logic are discussed. Walter Lawrence's Military Fortifications of Ancient Egypt chronicles the development and innovation of military technology in the fortress walls and their appendages from the Middle Kingdom to the New Kingdom.
Walter noted some of the economic factors behind the construction of the fort. He believed that from the appearance of these walls, their main function was not military defense but to provide a barrier to nearby trade routes. Due to the earlier writing time, this article fails to give an example of the former walls of the Middle Kingdom.
However, the author still attempts to briefly analyze the shape and function of the early walls from the murals and symbols of the same period.
Ian Shaw summarizes the development of ancient Egyptian fortress walls and defensive walls of towns at different times from the perspective of city defense.
In Ancient Egyptian War: Pharaoh's Tactics, Weapons and Ideology, he compares the changes in the design concept of fortress walls at different times under the influence of multiple factors such as the degree of military threat, specific terrain differences, and foreign technological influences.
He also recreated the practical use of these walls in warfare through text and graphic materials. It also noted the ritualistic and monumental functions contained in the symmetrical and antique shapes of some defensive walls.
As one of the research objects of the history of ancient building technology, the wall has also attracted attention.
Jeffrey Spencer's Brick Architecture in Ancient Egypt is the only monograph currently available in the field of mudbrick architecture. The book devotes two chapters to the construction techniques of defensive walls and other types of walls in ancient Egypt.
The various links involved in the construction of the wall, including the production and bonding of mud bricks, the stacking method and reinforcement methods of the wall, etc., were fully discussed. In recent years, the research on building technology has gradually focused on the most basic component of the wall, the mud brick itself. This is the result of the development of contemporary experimental archaeology.
Through experimental archaeological means, we can obtain important information such as the composition and source of the soil inside the mud brick, and the types of plants contained in the mud brick, so as to provide a strong basis for us to judge the construction age of the wall itself and the organization of labor during the construction process.
The study of ancient Egyptian architectural terminology related to enclosures has pushed the study of enclosures into the field of semantic research. Frank Monnier has compiled scattered analyses by scholars such as O'Connor and Alan Gardiner.
Centered on the term JNB, the actual reference to architectural terms related to walls and enclosures in ancient Egypt is discussed. He eventually concluded that the term sbty was often used to refer to the brick walls that surrounded the exterior of cities, temples, and forts.
JNB and SBTY tend to have the same meaning in the late period, but their meaning is greater than the latter. It can refer to any single wall, enclosure, or single building such as a fortress.
It is worth noting that he believes that these words should etymically have more to do with "building" than "defense".
Thematic studies of settlement walls are rare. The Invisible Walls of Egypt focuses on the discussion of the multiple functions of settlement walls. It is actually a refutation of the erroneous view that Egypt is a town without walls in James Tracy's Walls: A Network of Cities in a Global Perspective.
This article describes the development of the ancient Egyptian wall from the former dynasty to the Islamic rule. A brief combing of the historical development of ancient Egyptian walls from antiquity to the Middle Ages is carried out. The article discusses the multiple functions of the wall as a defensive building, a symbolic landscape, and a status symbol at different times.
Particular emphasis is placed on the subtle influence of these walls on the psyche of ancient Egyptians as striking public landscapes. At the same time, the article also provides archaeological examples of walls from the early dynasty to the Old Kingdom, which to a certain extent makes up for the lack of physical historical materials in this early history.
The Wall of Ruling: The Development of Monumental Walls in Ancient Egypt Before the New Kingdom is the latest and only monograph in current research on walls. Based on rich archaeological examples, this paper summarizes in detail the historical development of settlement walls in the pre-Middle Kingdom period.
Important information such as the functional evolution and classification of walls, architectural terminology related to walls, how walls are built and how the workforce is organized is summarized.
The author argues that the monumental walls of ancient Egypt should be seen as a kind of architectural tool for the Egyptian authorities to exert their influence in material form. The monumental and administrative value of the wall in practical application may far exceed its more prominent military defense function.
Compared with Western academic circles, there is a big gap in domestic research on walls. No monographs or books on the wall have been published. In Early Cities in Ancient Egypt, Liu Wenpeng sees city walls as one of the criteria for judging the emergence of urbanization.
He believes that the color palette and wall models of the late pre-dynasty show the image of the early dynasty city with a protective wall. It should be seen as "yet another piece of evidence of the existence of ancient Egyptian cities".
Both Zhou Minzhi and Li Zhiwei's master's thesis gave a brief introduction to the walls of cities and artisan villages during the Middle Kingdom.
It's just that the former focuses on the Fayoum region of the 12th Dynasty; The latter briefly sorts out the development of settlement walls throughout the Middle Kingdom period according to the differences in settlement types of capital cities, provincial capitals, fortresses, and planned towns.
To sum up, there are currently three main problems in the study of settlement walls.
First, the relevant studies themselves are small in number and scattered. Scholars usually discuss a specific function of a wall or a certain link in the construction of a wall. A comprehensive examination of the wall itself is inadequate.
Second, the study of the wall relies too much on the archaeological evidence itself, and lacks integration with textual and contemporaneous historical information.
For example, if we rely solely on the sheer size of the southern Egyptian fortress during the Middle Kingdom, Nubia posed a serious military threat to Egypt. This judgment then contradicts the Enu relationship revealed in Egyptian texts of the same period.
Third, although the analysis of the function of the wall has touched on many levels, such as defensive, monumental and political. However, the specific performance of these attributes in different types and levels of settlements has not been fully analyzed.
Fourth, the study of this will help us grasp the power game between the central and local governments in ancient Egypt, and even between provincial capitals and their subordinate towns, thereby deepening our understanding of the political ecology of the ancient Egyptians.