4000 to 3000 BCE · Africanspan
Egypt was founded in a corridor that begins in Sudan
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The country in which Egyptian civilisation was assembled runs from a point several hundred kilometres south of the meeting of the White Nile and the Blue Nile north to El Badari in Middle Egypt, about fifteen hundred kilometres of river. That stretch is the cultural heartland. The Delta and the coastal contacts with the Levant belong to later chapters, and a single late northern site has been carrying an argument about origins that it cannot support. Skeletal evidence from the founding cemeteries of the fourth millennium BCE, El Badari and Naqada above all, agrees with what the geography already indicates. The people who built the first Egyptian communities came from the south and from the African interior. Upper Egypt and Nubia, the regions the European tradition files as peripheral, are where the civilisation was made. Selective genetic sampling from the wrong place and the wrong century does not change the address.
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