3500–3200 BCE: (The Kingdom of Qustul — A New Growth of Political Scale in the Middle and Second Half of the Fourth Millennium Across the Middle and Northern…

3500–3200 BCE: (The Kingdom of Qustul — A New Growth of Political Scale in the Middle and Second Half of the Fourth Millennium Across the Middle and Northern Parts of the Middle Nile Culture Area, the Major Kingdom of This Period Possibly Centered in the Northern Nilo-Saharan-Speaking Lands Immediately South of Upper Egypt with Its Hegemony Probably Extending North Beyond the First Cataract, Its Capital and Royal Burial Locations at Qustul in Lower Nubia Between the First and Second Cataracts): In the middle and second half of the fourth millennium a new growth of political scale began to take hold across the middle and northern parts of the Middle Nile Culture Area — not just in southern Upper Egypt, but also in the lands inhabited by Nilo-Saharan-speaking peoples and extending well south through Nubia. The major kingdom of the period from roughly 3500 down to as late as 3200 BCE may actually have been centered in the northern Nilo-Saharan-speaking lands, immediately south of Upper Egypt, but with its hegemony probably extending north beyond the first cataract into southern Upper Egypt. It had its capital and royal burial locations at Qustul in Lower Nubia, partway between the first and second cataracts. Consider what this means for the standard narrative of Egyptian state formation. The first major kingdom in the Middle Nile Culture Area — the first polity of significant political scale in the region that would become ancient Egypt — may not have been Egyptian at all. It may have been Nubian, centered at Qustul, ruled by Nilo-Saharan-speaking kings whose political authority extended northward into what would later become Upper Egypt. The kingdom that preceded the pharaonic state was a Nubian kingdom. The political traditions, the royal iconography, the institutional forms that the first pharaohs would inherit and transform were not invented in Egypt. They were developed in Nubia, by Nilo-Saharan-speaking rulers who presided over a polity that straddled the cultural boundary between the two linguistic zones of the Middle Nile Culture Area. The unification of Egypt around 3100 BCE was not the beginning of state formation in the Nile Valley. It was the culmination of a process that had begun centuries earlier, in Nubia, at Qustul.