Egyptian society did not spring fully ordered and organized instantly into being: the point must still be made, for both the appearance and the reality are so extraordinary. In a matter of a few short centuries the Egyptian kingdom was devised and formulated, to endure in all its essential characteristics for three thousand years, the longest lasting of all complex human societies. Egypt’s social sophistication was profound at a time when all the world, except for Sumer, was locked in a benighted barbarism which in all its essentials had been unchanged for thousands of generations, since indeed, Palaeolithic times; if Egyptian society did not in fact emerge fully developed, an observer might be forgiven for thinking that it did, so far removed was it from any sort of human experience up to that time.
Egypt’s emergence as a true nation-state is well charted. Her roots lay deep in the earth of the Valley on which her splendid temples, palaces, and tombs were to be built; but she was also profoundly African, by no means wholly impervious to foreign influence in the earliest times, though the character and extent of that influence is much debated still.
The procession of the dynasties into which Egyptian history is divided falls, broadly, into two parts, the predynastic and dynastic periods, and thereafter into a diversity of subdivisions of often bewildering complexity and number. At this point, however, we are concerned with that period which is termed the ‘predynastic’, that is to say, the time from somewhat before 5000 BC, when distinct communities can first be seen emerging, first in the deserts, then on the banks of the Nile. This process began long before the supposed unification of the state, which is conventionally dated as taking place during the early years of the thirty-second century before the present era. The predynastic period, therefore, deals with the time to t, 3200 BC.
World History
