20,000–6000 BCE: (Two Foundational Stories of Ancient Egypt — The Deep-Time Story of Developments and Influences from 6000 to 3100 BCE and the Very-Deep-Time…

20,000–6000 BCE: (Two Foundational Stories of Ancient Egypt — The Deep-Time Story of Developments and Influences from 6000 to 3100 BCE and the Very-Deep-Time Story with Beginnings Before 15,000 BCE, the History of Egypt’s Foundations as Now Told by the Cohort of Archaeologists Who Over the Past Thirty Years Have Greatly Expanded Our Knowledge, Backed Up by Physical Anthropology and Linguistics, and the Methodology Requiring Comparative Linguistic and Comparative Cultural Evidence in Coordination with Archaeology): There are, it turns out, two ancient Egyptian foundational stories to tell. One of these might be called the deep-time story — the history of developments and influences from 6000 to 3100 BCE. And then there is also what one might call the very-deep-time story, with its beginnings dating to before 15,000 BCE. The history presented here is the history of Egypt’s foundations as it is now told by the cohort of archaeologists who, over the past thirty years, have so greatly expanded and reshaped our historical knowledge of those regions and times. The evidence of physical anthropology and from linguistics only further adds to and backs up those findings. Delving into this history requires a mix of historical approaches: comparative linguistic and comparative cultural evidence in coordination with archaeology. The standard narrative of Egyptian origins begins with the Predynastic period — a few centuries of increasingly complex societies in Upper Egypt before unification around 3100 BCE. Ehret insists that this conventional starting point is thousands of years too late. The cultural foundations of what would become ancient Egypt were being laid in the Nile Valley and the surrounding Saharan and Sudanic regions across a span of time so deep that it dwarfs the entirety of pharaonic history. To understand Egypt, you must go back not to the Predynastic but to the Last Glacial Maximum and its aftermath.