Orient the principal axis of the monument on the rising or setting of the sun at a solstice, so that the architecture frames it.
The pyramid town: laid out at once, divided by rank
Build the town for a royal pyramid in one campaign, as a walled rectangle on a grid of straight streets; wall off the quarter of the labourers’ small houses from the quarter of the officials’ mansions, and give each rank a standard house.
Kahun was built under Senusret II (c. 1890 BC) to house the priests, officials and workmen who built his pyramid and kept its cult. Flinders Petrie cleared it in 1889–90: a rectangle of some 13 hectares inside a mud-brick wall, laid out on one plan, with streets running straight north–south and east–west and a stone-lined channel down the middle of each for drainage.
A thick wall divided a western quarter of some two hundred small houses in back-to-back rows from an eastern quarter where a broad street was lined with mansions of about 40 × 60 m, each with its own granaries. Papyri from the town record households, rations and property. It is the clearest evidence we have that the Egyptian state planned towns as it planned pyramids: by measure, all at once, and by rank.
Related rules
Arrange the temple on a single axis (pylon, open court, hypostyle hall, sanctuary) so that at each threshold the floor rises, the roof descends and the light diminishes, until the god’s shrine is reached in darkness.
In a great columned hall make the columns of the central aisle taller than the rest, and fill the difference in height with stone grilles, so that light enters high up over the side aisles.
Turn the principal rooms and the columned portico of a house to face north, towards the cool prevailing wind, and keep the walls to the south and west blank against the sun.
Find a granary’s capacity from its measures: multiply length, breadth and height in cubits (or, for a round bin, the square of eight-ninths of the diameter by the height), and add half as much again to turn cubic cubits into the grain measure, the khar.
1 cubic cubit = 1½ khar
Cite this page Chris Paton, “The pyramid town: laid out at once, divided by rank”, The Textbook of Architecture, https://textbookofarchitecture.com/rule/kahun-planned-town. Text, drawings and models licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0.