The Development of Social Complexity in Early Egypt: a View from the Perspective of the Settlements and Material Culture of the Nile Valley
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[1] University of Vienna
University of Vienna
Innere Stadt, Austria
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- Localización: Ägypten und Levante: Internationale Zeitschrift für ägyptische archäologie und deren nachbargebeite, ISSN 1015-5104, Nº. 27, 2017, págs. 335-356
- Idioma: inglés
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Resumen
The cemeteries of the southern Egyptian Nile Valley have for a long time taken up a major role in the reconstruction of the emergence of social complexity during the 5th and 4th millennia and of the early territorial state of Pharaonic Egypt. Whilst this data is very substantial and highly important, it has overshadowed other archaeological information that is equally significant and that actually challenges certain interpretations deriving only from mortuary data. This paper aims at considering archaeological evidence primarily derived from a number of settlements and from material culture of the Neolithic, Chalcolithic and until the Early Dynastic Periods to better balance and contextualise the mortuary evidence of these periods. It will discuss and interpret these on the background of current scholarship on material culture, interregional exchange and social complexity and will especially seek to answer questions concerning the socio-economic context of institutionalised leadership and its potential links to early kingship. The paper will also address the high degree of variability in archaeological data and thereby contribute to a growing scholarly consensus that Egypt’s path to civilisation and statehood followed a number of different, often unrelated, trajectories within a regionally variable cultural system in the Egyptian Nile Valley.
