Istwa Nou

By the later fourth millennium BCE dense populations had formed in a handful of places: the Nile valley through Egypt, Nubia and northern Sudan, then Mesopotamia, the Indus valley, the two great river valleys of China, and the coast of Peru. In each of them access to resources and to power grew steadily more unequal. Social classes formed, then chiefly authority, then kings and the full apparatus of stratification, with religious authority consolidated into formal priesthoods alongside. None of that started from zero. The societies of the previous three thousand years were smaller and less intensely ranked, and they already had inherited offices, ritual specialists and differences of status. The large states took those materials and hardened them, formalised them and put them in stone. Africa is where the process can be watched most closely, because reconstructed vocabulary and comparative ethnography reach into periods that left no writing, while the records of the literate civilisations begin only after the outcome was settled.