3000 BCE–300 CE: (Early Unequal and Stratified Societies — A More Familiar Theme Being the Rise of Early States Towns and Highly Unequal and Stratified Socie…

3000 BCE–300 CE: (Early Unequal and Stratified Societies — A More Familiar Theme Being the Rise of Early States Towns and Highly Unequal and Stratified Societies, These Developments Taking Place Not Just in the Traditionally Favored Regions of Egypt Mesopotamia and China but in Multiple Regions Simultaneously, Ancient Egyptian Culture Itself Having Taken Shape Within a Wider Wholly African Cultural Sphere with Towns and Monuments Not Just in Upper Egypt but Equally Early Farther South Along the Nile): A second recurrent theme of the age from 3000 BCE to 300 CE is a more familiar one to readers of history — the rise of early states and towns and of highly unequal and stratified societies. These sorts of developments took place not just in the parts of the world long given favored standing by historians — regions such as Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China. And in any case, even ancient Egyptian culture itself took shape, as Ehret has demonstrated, within a wider, wholly African cultural sphere, with towns and monuments not just in Upper Egypt but equally early farther south along the Nile. The conventional telling of ancient history treats the rise of states and stratified societies as a story with a small number of protagonists — Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, China — presented as if they were the only places where complex society emerged. Ehret insists that this framing is both geographically narrow and conceptually impoverished. Complex society — social stratification, hereditary authority, monumental architecture, priestly control of ritual — emerged independently in multiple regions, and the regions the conventional narrative privileges are not even the earliest in every case. Nubia had monumental architecture before Egypt. The Qustul state had royal regalia before the pharaohs. To tell the story of early states as an Egyptian or Mesopotamian story is to begin in the middle and call it the beginning.