A walled town of about 13 hectares built in one campaign for the priests, officials and workmen of Senusret II’s pyramid: a grid of streets, a walled quarter of standard small houses, a row of great houses with north-facing porticoes and granaries, and the pyramid itself across the desert edge.
Egypt left no treatise on town planning, but it left Kahun. Built around 1890 BC beside the pyramid of Senusret II at the mouth of the Faiyum and cleared by Flinders Petrie in 1889–90, it shows the state planning a town as it planned a pyramid: by measure and all at once. A mud-brick wall encloses a rectangle; a thick inner wall shuts off the western quarter, where some two hundred identical small houses stand back to back along narrow lanes. In the eastern quarter a broad street is lined with mansions of about 40 by 60 m, each with a porticoed court turned to the cool north wind and a block of vaulted granaries, grain being the currency in which the town was paid.
West of the town the valley temple, the causeway and the pyramid complete the scheme. The pyramid, of mud brick on a rock core cased in limestone, rises at a seked of about 7.6 palms, the unit the Rhind papyrus teaches; a ring of trees was planted in pits cut round its enclosure. East of the town lies the Bahr Yusuf, the channel that waters the Faiyum, with its fields and palms.
Much is restored. The south-east of the town is lost and is filled here on the pattern of the surviving blocks; the valley temple, almost wholly destroyed, is shown as the book’s standard axial temple; and the desert between town and pyramid is shortened. Click a building for its rule and its evidence.