Istwa Nou

The megaliths at Nabta Playa carry political information as well as ritual information. The burials around them are uneven. Grave goods and placement separate people by rank, which means the community using the site was stratified by the fifth millennium BCE. Somebody had to know which star rose where and when, which implies a group of specialists trained in that knowledge and holding the ritual duties that went with it. Somebody had to organise the quarrying, hauling and raising of heavy stone, which implies authority over labour. Ehret reads the site as the ritual centre of a polity, most likely of the sacral type that Nilo-Saharan peoples were already practising, where the ruler holds religious and temporal power at once. Ranked burials, a trained priesthood, sacral rule and monumental building are the standard checklist for a complex society. All four are present in the desert a thousand years before Egypt was unified.