A society may declare its own understanding of itself explicitly or implicitly in the way villages and towns are built and grow. New towns express a single moment of planning, as at Middle Kingdom Lahun or New Kingdom Akhetaten. Other settlements grow over time, best documented for Abu (Elephantine), charting social ethics more implicitly. Whatever inhabitants of a society may write, the sizes and arrangement of housing tell the direct story of living conditions and ranges of wealth and health which that society supports. At Lahun and Akhetaten, waterfront buildings are not preserved, removing from our view the densest trading and industrial zones, where the poorest housing might be expected. The Lahun new town, founded in 1900-1850 BC (Figure 4.17), is zoned into three general house sizes on repeating plans and so plausibly from the original town plan (Doyen 2010): (1) a dozen palatial 40 x 60 m units, (2) separate zones of middle-sized units, and (3) zones of smaller housing units, generally closer to the palatial mansions. Small houses are bigger than smallest houses elsewhere; either these townspeople had
Larger houses or a lost canal side with wharfs included a fourth category of poorest dwellings. At Akhetaten, the palatial houses may have been planned first, with medium - and small-sized housing following. English 1920s-1930s excavation reports refer to hovels, but the smallest houses on the site are again larger than those known at other sites, and so the poorest level may be missing alongside the docks and wharfs outside archaeological view.
In ethical terms, the range of house sizes indicates a society that tolerates major differences in living standards. Preserved palaces of kings (1550-1200 Bc) are on an altogether vaster scale, as are the funerary monuments of kings from 3000 to 1070 Bc, as if confirming the separate nature of the king, distinct from humankind. If cemeteries reflect social life at least indirectly, funerary archaeology charts material inequality back to the fourth millennium BC. Those tombs relate that, not why, a few are wealthier, nor how individuals enter or leave the wealthy set. The earliest groups of rich tombs with enough written evidence to identify links between the deceased are from the courts of king and regional governors. The two main links are kinship (members of same family buried close or together) and administration or estate management (e. g., officials of regional governor buried with governor, not with family; cf. Seidlmayer 1987, 210-214). These two general patterns in social group formation create a platform for exclusion and inclusion, in preferential treatment of some against others. Groupings formed on other grounds, such as ethnicity, are rarely visible, as in distinctive burials of Nubian desert nomads in Egyptian cemeteries (1900-1700 Bc) (Pan Grave; for groupings by age, within one social/wealth level, in the funerary record, see Chapter 2).
Material culture confirms patterns of social distinction throughout these millennia. Commissioning and production would start at palaces of kingship, although production sites have rarely been identified archaeologically on the ground; the two main examples are the Akhetaten house ascribed to a head sculptor Thutmes and the walled stone village at Deir al-Madina, base for the project of decorating the tomb of the king. In history of use, it would be wrong to assume that only wealthier Egyptians had exclusive access to highest quality. The finest ancient glassfish vase was found in a small house at Akhetaten. The 1930s excavation report concluded it had probably been stolen—such a prize had no right to live in poverty. Regularly, wealthier classes assume their own monopoly of finery, even, bizarrely, beauty and goodness; the English reporters imposed this view on the Akhetaten inhabitants, without considering in their own society the potential for a working-class woman, for example, to save enough for an object of beauty (cf. on appreciation of modern English literature, Rose 2001). Reassessment of associated finds has raised ethnicity as an explanatory factor: the glassfish may have been in the house of its maker, perhaps Syrian (Shortland 2009). Excavation recorders also assumed theft in the case of a hoard at a well in Akhetaten—a pot containing silver and gold bars and objects. Barry Kemp has compared, instead, a Ramesside letter with instructions on where to find buried bronze and a pot of silver and gold, as if a regular strategy for safeguarding metal (Kemp 2006, 315-317). Small hoards need not automatically be identified as cases of theft; they might more generally document periodic cracks in walls between social groups with different living standards.
Hoards testify to concerns over securing possessions against others in a society. As a negative material record of social ethics, hoards contest ideals of harmony and contentedness. Here, the written legal record provides more explicit material.
World History
