Community and society in Egypt in the First Intermediate Period: An archaeological investigation of the Abydos settlement site

This dissertation investigates aspects of household and community organization at Abydos, Egypt, a major provincial town, within the context of larger questions about the nature of Egyptian society. The temporal context is the First Intermediate Period, a period of relative political decentralization. Based primarily on the original excavation of a group of houses from this period in the ancient town site of Abydos, this study examines several parameters of household and community organization as indicators of some of the basic building blocks of Egyptian society. This study provides a window on the role of settlements in ancient Egypt within the framework of historical circumstances and examines some important attributes of societal complexity in Egypt.; A degree of individualism is indicated even within the narrow segment of the town excavated. The size and organization of the houses, and hence the likely statuses of their inhabitants, varies notably. The evident variability suggests the complexity of the Egyptian socio-economic system and the degree to which the houses connected to larger social and economic contexts in different ways and to different degrees, giving the impression that different households pursued different strategies and had different priorities.; This investigation at Abydos illuminates important aspects of the complexity of Egyptian society in general in the First Intermediate Period and the degree to which provincial life continued as usual even in the absence of a single unitary state. A significant implication of this research is that the extent of state control of and involvement in the structure of daily life in ancient Egypt has often been overestimated. This necessarily forces a reevaluation of the role of the state administration in the daily life of the majority of ancient Egyptians and the degree to which political centralization had an effect on the social and economic organization of provincial areas, with implications for a number of analytical models that have been applied to ancient Egypt.