Combinatorial Evolution and Heterogeneous Cohabitation at the Giant Pyramids

This paper examines the Heit el-Ghurab site of Fourth Dynasty settlement at Giza in terms of complexity, imposed, top-down, by central authorities, and bottom-up, self-organized, and emergent. Brian Arthur’s concept of technology as the capture of phenomena, either physical or behavioural, clarifies how central authorities combined existing architecture of storage magazines with standard components of a house and replicated the design in modular barracks to house members of phyles, a unit of labour adapted from age-set systems such as were endemic to East Africa and the upper Nile in more recent centuries. HeG functioned more like a company town than an emergent, robust, adaptive city.

Until more settlements are excavated near later pyramids, we cannot tell if the innovation of the HeG barracks was influential, or short-lived and anomalous. We do know that over the longue durée, the HeG was one manifestation of continuous urban development that saw cycles of nucleation and distributed settlement in Egypt’s capital zone, just above the Nile Delta apex.