Dynastic Egypt and the Nile

The Nile valley is the home to Africa's earliest literate cultures, and it is thus where we begin our story. Although early humans evolved in Africa approximately 2 million years ago, the first African whom we know by name is the Egyptian king Narmer, who lived a scant five thousand years ago. It was the unique geography of the Nile valley that gave rise to the first literate civilizations on the continent.

Egypt in history is an African desert where rain seldom falls. It would be a land of sand and rock and wind without the Nile bringing water and nutrients that bind Egypt to the equatorial lakes of East Africa and the highlands of Ethiopia. The implacable Egyptian desert lies on either bank of the river, but in the Pleistocene (1,600,000–10,000 bce) the Sahara was green with grasslands, forests, and animals in profusion, which drank from its lakes and flowing rivers. Seminomadic herdsmen had domesticated cattle around 9000 bce. They built monolithic tombs with ritual cattle burials and standing stone structures aligned with the sun to calculate the change of seasons. Five thousand years ago, the Pleistocene gradually came to an end, and the relentless desiccation of the Sahara began. Hunters, gatherers, and herdsmen who had roamed its savanna and forests and had established settlements now had to follow the water, without which they could not survive, to congregate by the banks of the Nile. Here they encountered and settled with people who had experimented with agriculture by cultivating the rich Nile loam, living in villages, and developing new social and political relationships. It was in coming together in this limited space by the banks of the Nile that hunting camps became villages and villages became towns dependent on agriculture, first domesticated in Mesopotamia in approximately 9000 bce, which reached Egypt, slowly, about 5500 bce. Wheat, barley, and millet were cultivated; fish were caught; domesticated cattle, sheep, and goats foraged on the grasslands by the river, while geese and chickens pecked their way through the farmyards. The abundance in the fields and the evolution of political and social organizations enabled the Egyptians to build pyramids, temples, and urban communities whose continuity transcended three thousand years, longer than any civilization in Asia or the West.