6000–3500 BCE: (Social Differentiation as Foundation Not Innovation — What These Histories Tell Us Being That Social Differentiation and Political and Religi…

6000–3500 BCE: (Social Differentiation as Foundation Not Innovation — What These Histories Tell Us Being That Social Differentiation and Political and Religious Elite Classes Were Not De Novo Creations of the Highly Stratified Societies of the Mid-Fourth Millennium BCE but Were Built on Foundations Laid by Earlier Smaller-Scale Societies with Emergent Status Differentiations, by the Later Fourth Millennium Dense Population Concentrations Arising in the Nile Valley Including Egypt Nubia and Northern Sudan, Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, the Two Major River Valleys of China, and Coastal Peru): What these histories tell us is that social differentiation and political and religious elite classes were not de novo creations of the highly stratified societies that took shape by the middle of the fourth millennium BCE in several far-separate parts of the world. Those stratified societies surely built their institutions on foundations laid down by earlier, smaller-scale societies — societies with emergent social status differentiations, even if of less marked and intense kinds. By the later fourth millennium BCE, a number of areas of significantly denser population concentrations had arisen in several parts of the world: the Nile valley, both in Egypt and Nubia and apparently farther south in northern Sudan; Mesopotamia; the Indus valley; the two major river valleys of China; and, in the Americas, coastal Peru. An increasing inequality of access to resources and to power and status took place in those regions of more concentrated population, with social classes and chiefly levels of political authority taking shape first, followed by kings and complex social stratification as population and unequal access to resources continued to grow. A consolidation and formalization of religious authority in priesthoods commonly took place as well. The point is both simple and revolutionary: civilization did not spring from nothing. Every pharaoh stood on the shoulders of a *-kumo, a *waap'(er)-, a sacral chief of the Aquatic communities. Every priestly hierarchy grew from the ritual authority of clan religious figures whose positions had been evolving for millennia before the first temple was built. The stratified societies of the fourth millennium — Egypt, Mesopotamia, the Indus, China — did not invent social complexity. They intensified it, formalized it, monumentalized it. But the raw materials — the inherited positions, the ritual authority, the status differentiations — were already present in the smaller-scale societies of the preceding millennia, societies that Africa’s linguistic and ethnographic record allows us to see with a clarity that the written records of the literate civilizations cannot match.