3300 to 3100 BCE · Africanspan
Qustul dries out while Upper Egypt fills up
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Between 3300 and 3100 BCE the Qustul kingdom lost wealth and power as desiccation thinned out the populations of the country around it. Lower Nubia has little arable land beside the river. Upper Egypt has a great deal more, so as people left the drying hinterland the polities there could support far larger populations and raise far larger armies. Three things followed in the last three centuries of the fourth millennium BCE. One or more large polities took shape in the Naqada regions of Upper and Middle Egypt. Writing was invented. Then, in the thirty-first century, rulers of the First Dynasty unified the Nile from Aswan to the delta. The centre of gravity moved north while the cultural material stayed where it was. People arriving from the dying desert carried with them the ritual practice, the royal imagery and the idea of sacral kingship that this region had been developing for three thousand years.
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