Disembedded capitals are urban sites founded de novo and designed to supplant existing patterns of authority and administration. While a controversial topic in New World archaeology, there is ample evidence from ancient Western Asia and Egypt to demonstrate that disembedded capitals were a well-understood and frequently used option in developed state systems. Ethnohistoric examples from Egypt and Mesopotamia are presented to show the common organizational, ideological, and ecological features of disembedded capitals, and their varying historical and imperial contexts. Disembedded capitals were typically founded by new elites, either usurpers or reformers, as part of innovations designed to simultaneously undercut competing factions and create new pattterns of allegiance and authority. But while intended to break away from existing power relationships, in order to function disembedded capitals were necessarily reembedded back into those structures, In an evolutionary sense disembedded capitals were short-lived phenomena which tended to create long-term societal problems.