Circumstances comparable to those in Mesopotamia explain to a large extent the rise of civilization in Egypt. In the course of the 5th millennium BC, Neolithic groups from North Africa and the eastern Mediterranean coastlands settled in the delta of the Nile and along the river’s edges in Egypt. Here too, a large population could arise thanks to the exceptionally high yields in the cultivated strips of land. Relative to the Near East, Egypt for some time remained, so to say, the receiving and junior party. Not only had the knowledge of agriculture come, ultimately, from the Fertile Crescent, as would later the knowledge of copper and bronze, but early Egyptian architecture also suggests some derivation from Mesopotamia. The Egyptian hieroglyphic script appears around 3000 BC, rather suddenly and in an already developed form; its antecedents are unknown but most probably indigenous. In any case, contacts with the Near East in the 3rd millennium seem to have become more difficult, perhaps as a result of further desertification, especially in the Sinai, and from then on Egyptian civilization developed for a long time in relative isolation. Cities, comparable to those in Mesopotamia, did not appear here, the population went on living in villages. On the other hand, not long after the beginning of the 3rd millennium the country was unified politically, an event that doubtless had been furthered by the existence of the one river on which all inhabitants depended. As a consequence, Egyptian civilization developed mainly around the person of the king, who governed the whole country, and around a religion in which that king played a central role. Bronze remained unknown here for a rather long time, but the working of stone was since the 3rd millennium BC in the typically Egyptian form of a late Neolithic copper culture brought to great finesse and used for the erection of temples and grave monuments in the service of religion and kingship.
World History
