Thanks to Chris Towsend for highlighting this page:
The urban grid has a history stretching to the first civilizations. In ancient Egypt, along the flat featureless banks of the Nile, the orthogonal subdivision of the fields came naturally. The river ran north to south; east to west was the direction of the rising and setting sun. After the floods, which replenished the soils each year, the farmers would rebuild the bunds parallel and perpendicular to the river. As population grew, people started building on the farmlands, and the pattern would follow the pre-existing boundaries.This page is accompanied by satellite photographs of the grids in question, and a plan of Kahun.
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