ORIENTATION

Through Pharaonic Egypt, Africa lays claim to being the cradle of one of the earliest and most spectacular civilizations of antiquity. The aim of this chapter is to trace the development of this civilization from the introduction of a south-west Asian-style subsistence economy into the Nile Valley to its florescence at the beginning of the Old Kingdom, conventionally dated about 2700 BC. Egyptologists conventionally divide this span into a Predynastic Period, prior to the traditional First Dynasty of the Egyptian chronicler Manetho, and a subsequent Early Dynastic Period, which corresponds with Manetho's first two dynasties. This division has been justified by assuming that the beginning of the First Dynasty corresponded with the political unification of Egypt and marked a critical break in Egyptian history. While it is evident that political unification played a major long-term role in shaping the cultural patterns of ancient Egypt, this achievement was part of a continuum of social and cultural change that was well advanced in late Predynastic times and reached its culmination in the Old Kingdom. Because of this, it is profitable to view the entire formative period of Egyptian civilization as a single unit.

Although the Egyptian script was developed during the Early Dynastic Period, written sources for this period are extremely limited and present numerous epigraphic difficulties. Even the succession of kings and the identifications of the royal Horus-names appearing on the monuments of this period with the nebty- or insibya-names given in the later king-lists are far from certain in many cases (see appendix, p. 69).