Pyramid Building and Panarchy

Abstract Panarchy and resilience thinking can be applied to networks of human–environment interaction during Egypt’s Old Kingdom to link archaeology, history, and physical sciences across different scales of time and space, and to assess natural hazards and disasters both realized and avoided. Currently, panarchy has not been utilized in Egyptology, where debate persists about the interactions of Holocene environmental changes and ancient Egyptian civilization. Some reconciliation may come from a more explicit framing of cross-scale arguments, the contrasting spatial and temporal scales examined, their interactions, and how they impact the visibility and understanding of environmental change and its implications for ancient people.

Heit el-Ghurab (~2613–2495 BCE) is framed in panarchy to explore the interaction and co-creation of societal and environmental change at many scales—site, regional, and planetary; short term or long term. Although relationships of time and space in panarchy are usually discussed as either small and fast or large and slow, unpredictable changes—including volcanic eruptions, environmental degradation, or cultural shifts– can also drive transformation on large and fast or small and slow scales. Besides environmental changes, Heit el-Ghurab is framed by notable social continuity across the generations who built royal tombs, and larger cycles of construction, occupation, and movement of royal supply lines that facilitated the creation of some of these monuments.

This article combines environmental and human systems, resisting the common but problematic human–nature divide, and takes an integrated approach to assessing environmental and societal change in ancient Egypt, and the cycles of mortuary construction and social organization that characterized Heit el-Ghurab and the pyramid builders.