To house the labourers who built royal monuments, the Egyptian state laid out purpose-built settlements on regular plans. Kahun (Lahun), founded around 1850 BCE beside the pyramid of Senusret II, was a walled, rectangular town divided by straight streets into standardised mud-brick terraces, segregating larger officials' houses from rows of workers' dwellings. Deir el-Medina, the New Kingdom village of the tomb-builders near Thebes, repeated the model with a single main street lined by near-identical narrow houses. Both were founded, provisioned and abandoned as instruments of state, not organic growth.
These are among the earliest documented examples of a settlement designed in advance as a gridded, class-segregated unit to serve a state project, prefiguring later company towns and planned labour settlements.
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