3000 BCE to 300 CE · Africanspan
Qustul had royal regalia before Egypt had pharaohs
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States, towns and steeply unequal societies show up in the record between 3000 BCE and 300 CE, and they show up in far more places than the short list of Egypt, Mesopotamia and China that the textbooks favour. Egyptian culture itself took shape inside a wider African cultural sphere. Towns and monuments went up in Upper Egypt and equally early further south along the Nile. Nubia had monumental building before Egypt did. The state at Qustul had royal regalia before there were pharaohs to wear it. Hereditary authority, priestly control of ritual, monumental architecture and stratified classes emerged independently in several regions, and the regions the conventional account puts first are not first in every case. Telling the story of early states as an Egyptian or Mesopotamian story means opening in the middle of the book and calling it page one.
A code like HT-WIB-000044 is a bates number. It marks one page of our stamped scan of the book, so the same page can be found again by anyone working from the same copy. Open one to see every entry drawn from that page.