Through Pharaonic Egypt, Africa lays claim to being the cradle of one of the earliest and most spectacular civilizations of antiquity. This chapter traces 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. Unlike in south-western Asia, few stratified sites have been discovered in the Nile Valley that could serve as a basis for working out a cultural chronology for Predynastic Egypt. Numerous similarities have long been apparent in the grammar, lexicon and phonology of ancient Egyptian and the Semitic languages. The most recent use of physical anthropological findings to advance culture-historical arguments has been Emery's acceptance of Derry's theory of a 'Dynastic Race' as proof that the Early Dynastic civilization was brought into Egypt by a 'civilized aristocracy or master race'.