Initial Urbanization and the Emergence of the State in Hierakonpolis (Nile Valley) and Monte Albán (Oaxaca Valley)

Abstract

One of the main foci of comparative research on ancient societies deals with urban dynamics. Within this context, an interesting issue is the relationship between the processes of initial urbanization—i.e., the creation of the first cities—and the transformations that led to the emergence of state dynamics. Here, we will consider two historical situations in which both processes—urbanization and state origin—were, in broad terms, concomitant: Hierakonpolis, in the Nile Valley, towards the mid-4th millennium BC, and Monte Albán in the Valley of Oaxaca, in the second half of the 1st Millennium BC. We will address, first, the available evidence for both historical situations, which will be organized into four major areas—related to demographic dynamics, forms of functional specialization, social differentiation, and conflict—allowing us to see the main innovations that characterize these processes. And second, we will propose a reconsideration of the information that relates to a specific problem: the relationship between the concentration of population in urban contexts and the processes of social hierarchization that took place within urban centers as well as between these centers and the surrounding villages. In this sense, beyond the multiple differences between the states that, in the long run, would be consolidated in the Nile Valley and in the Oaxaca Valley, the beginnings of the urbanization processes that occurred in both regions have a common characteristic, which is fundamental for further transformations: the creation of a social context whose practices exceeded the limits related to the pre-existing logic of social organization.