5000–3100 BCE: (From Nabta Playa to the Old Kingdom — Social Stratification Already Underway in the Nilo-Saharan-Speaking Lands Around Nabta Playa and Adjace…

5000–3100 BCE: (From Nabta Playa to the Old Kingdom — Social Stratification Already Underway in the Nilo-Saharan-Speaking Lands Around Nabta Playa and Adjacent Parts of Nubia in the Fifth Millennium BCE, Trends Coming to Full Fruition Along the Nile Toward the End of the Fourth Millennium When Saharan Desiccation Concentrated Populations Densely Along the River Especially in Upper Egypt, the First Larger Territorial State Possibly Centered at Qustul Among Nilo-Saharan Speakers in the Middle Fourth Millennium, Two Thousand Years of Deep Cultural Interconnection Disabusing Us of the Notion That Egypt’s Origins Were Anything Other Than Integrally Embedded in African Cultural History): This kind of development — the consolidation of religious authority in priesthoods, sometimes in parallel with the concentration of political authority and sometimes even before — had already begun in the Nilo-Saharan-speaking lands around Nabta Playa and adjacent parts of Nubia in the fifth millennium BCE. These trends came to full fruition along the Nile toward the end of the fourth millennium, when a fuller drying out of the Sahara rapidly concentrated human populations even more densely in the areas right along the river itself and, most of all, in Upper Egypt. The first larger territorial state may have had its center at Qustul south of Egypt proper, in the middle fourth millennium, among Nilo-Saharan speakers. The rulers at Qustul already displayed royal regalia used also by the rulers of the contemporary emerging small states of Upper Egypt and by the later rulers of Old Kingdom Egypt. The artifactual evidence indicates that the hegemony of the Qustul state at times extended south into today’s Sudan, into lands as much as 200 kilometers west of the Nile, and into the areas east of the Nile as well. The preceding more than two thousand years of deep cultural interconnection and convergence across all these lands should disabuse us, once and for all, of the notion that the origins of ancient Egypt were anything other than integrally embedded in African cultural history. This is the summation of the argument, delivered with finality. From Nabta Playa in the fifth millennium to Qustul in the fourth to the Old Kingdom in the third, the trajectory is continuous, the cultural threads unbroken, the African foundations undeniable. The Saharan desiccation that compressed populations onto the Nile did not create Egyptian civilization from nothing. It compressed into a narrow ribbon of floodplain the accumulated cultural wealth of two thousand years of Middle Nile Culture Area interaction — the sacral kingship, the astronomical knowledge, the burial practices, the ceramic traditions, the royal iconography — and from that compression, under the pressure of dense population and scarce resources, the pharaonic state crystallized. Egypt was the diamond formed under pressure from African carbon.