4500 BCE: (Nabta Playa’s Political and Social Implications — The Site in All Likelihood Already the Ritual Center of a Polity of Some Kind in the Fifth Mille…

4500 BCE: (Nabta Playa’s Political and Social Implications — The Site in All Likelihood Already the Ritual Center of a Polity of Some Kind in the Fifth Millennium, Very Possibly of the Sudanic Sacral Type Already in Existence Among Nilo-Saharan Peoples, Burials Associated with the Megaliths Revealing Significant Social Stratification, and the Astronomically Oriented Arrays Implying the Existence of a Priestly Group with Specialized Astronomical Expertise and Ritual Responsibilities): Above and beyond their religious significance, the megalithic arrays at Nabta Playa have notable political and cultural implications. In all likelihood Nabta Playa was already the ritual center in the fifth millennium of a polity of some kind, very possibly of the Sudanic sacral type already in existence among Nilo-Saharan peoples of that period. The burials associated with the megaliths reveal a significant degree of social stratification among the adherents of the site. As well, the very existence of the astronomically oriented megalithic arrays tells us that there likely existed some sort of priestly group — people who trained in and possessed the necessary astronomical expertise and who carried out the ritual responsibilities related to that knowledge. Social stratification, specialized priesthoods, sacral kingship, monumental architecture — these are the hallmarks of complex society, and they are present at Nabta Playa a full millennium before the unification of Egypt. The Nilo-Saharan-speaking communities of the fifth millennium were not egalitarian bands of wandering herders. They were stratified societies with political leaders, ritual specialists, and the organizational capacity to quarry, transport, and erect massive stone monuments aligned to specific stars. The political complexity that would culminate in the pharaonic state did not spring fully formed from the soil of Upper Egypt in the late fourth millennium. It had antecedents — deep, structural antecedents — in the Nilo-Saharan-speaking polities of the desert and the steppe, polities whose ritual centers like Nabta Playa were already demonstrating the fusion of political authority, religious knowledge, and monumental construction that would become the defining features of ancient Egyptian civilization.