Ancient Egypt's transition to statehood happened faster than thought
A new paper reports that Egypt’s transition from a smattering of villages to one of history’s most enthralling political states took just 600 to 700 years.
Sometime in the 4th millennium BC, the pastoralists that had canvased the Sahara desert, packing up and moving in search of new hunting game, began to cluster around the Nile River Valley. There, the people rigged up villages and put down cereals plots. Life achieved a new, more regular, rhythm.
And in that same millennium, King Aha, the first of the eight dynastic rulers, ascended to power and pulled together those villages into a state: Egypt.
Now, a new paper published in the British journal Proceedings of the Royal Society A suggests that all this happened much faster than previously thought. According to the new research, Egypt’s transition from a loose collection of villages to one of history’s most enthralling political states took just 600 to 700 years, in dramatic contrast to the much longer transition in neighboring southwestern Asia.
“What we find is actually this period was shorter than people imagined,” said Michael Dee, a researcher at the Research Laboratory for Archaeology at the University of Oxford and the lead author on the paper, in an email. “Also, we find that the process was very different in Egypt from Mesopotamia – causing one to wonder whether there is a 'formula' for state formation, or whether each early state developed in its own way.”