5000 to 3100 BCE · Africanspan
Two thousand years of the Middle Nile end in a pharaoh
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Priesthoods and ranked societies were forming in the Nilo-Saharan lands around Nabta Playa and in neighbouring parts of Nubia during the fifth millennium BCE. The trend completed itself along the river toward the end of the fourth, when a drier Sahara pushed people onto the floodplain and concentrated them there, most heavily in Upper Egypt. The first large territorial state may have had its centre at Qustul, south of Egypt proper, among Nilo-Saharan speakers whose rulers were already using the regalia that the small emerging states of Upper Egypt used and that Old Kingdom pharaohs would use after them. Qustul's authority extended south into what is now Sudan, as much as two hundred kilometres west of the Nile, and into the country east of it as well. Set the sequence out in order and the question of whether ancient Egypt belongs to African history stops being a question. It was assembled over two thousand years by African communities in constant contact.
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