The Narmer Palette – a make-up palette from 3100 BC (or maybe as late as 2920 BC) showing Narmer, the first king of Egypt.
Egypt 3,100 years before Christ had just become a nation-state, the first in the world.
Note: This is so far back in time that dates can be off by up to 100 years or so. I follow the dates in “The Princeton Dictionary of Ancient Egypt” (2008).
- Location: north-eastern corner of Africa, within a few miles of the Nile River from the Great Green sea (the Mediterranean) to the Tropic of Cancer – the last 1,000 km of the Nile where ships can freely sail (they already have sails) north of the rocky Cataracts.
- Population: just under 1 million
- Major cities: north to south: Perwadjyt, Memphis, Thinis, Abydos, Nekhen (Hierakonpolis), Abu (Elephantine).
- Language: Archaic Egyptian – now with hieroglyphs!
- Religion: Horus, a falcon-headed god, or, really, just the king as the god Horus made flesh.
- Government: Narmer (aka Menes), the first king of the First Dynasty.
- Economy: wheat, cattle. Little rainfall – the Nile goes right through the Sahara – but every summer, starting the day after the star Sopdet (Sirius, Sothis) rises on the morning on July 17th, the Nile floods bringing water and soil, mainly from Ethiopia. Irrigation makes even better use of this gift of the Nile upon which Egypt is built.
The last 100 years: Narmer has united all of Egypt. We can tell because the Narmer Palette (pictured at top) shows him with the crowns of both Lower Egypt (the Delta – the Nile flows northwards) and Upper Egypt (where the Nile follows a single course). The Greeks knew him as King Menes. This made Egypt the first nation-state in the world: a piece of land ruled by an independent government, its people united not by blood, language or religion, but by land, territory, government. There are now about 200 nation-states, covering almost all the land outside of Antarctica. All that began here. This also makes Narmer the first king – of anywhere. The idea of kings wearing crowns also comes from Egypt.
Hieroglyphic writing is just about 100 years old. It is not yet being used to write books, as far as we know, but just labels, like on the Palette, and for record keeping. Hieratic, a cursive form of hieroglyphs, is already in use. Egyptians knew about Mesopotamia, but hieroglyphs are so different from Mesopotamian writing that they seem to be an indepedent invention. The Roman alphabet that I am writing in goes all the way back to Egyptian hieroglyphs.
Notice that the art of the Narmer Palette already “looks” Egyptian.
There were no pyramids yet.
Origins: Egyptians say they come from the south. And in fact the culture south of Egypt in Nubia is still pretty much the same. The Egyptian language is an Afro-Asiatic language, which probably come from what is now Ethiopia, though possibly the Sahara. The Sahara used to be green with trees and lakes. One of those now-dried-up lakes, Nabta Playa, 100 km west of the Nile in southern Egypt, has traces of Egyptian culture going back to 7500 BC. They herded cows and by 4500 BC were making monolithic calendar circles (think Stonehenge) and Egypt’s first monumental sculpture.
Meanwhile in Britain, brown-skinned people like the Whitehawk Woman are farming the land.
– Abagond, 2023.
See also:
- Egyptian century of the week
- Egypt
- Egyptian
- alphabet
- Nubia
- The British through time: the last 10,000 years
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Abagond 
Narmer was from Upper Egypt; i.e., the south. The “unification” of Egypt was a conquest by the southern people. I think it’s important to emphasize this because it means the people who were from closer to Nubia are the ones who did the conquering of the north and who established the nation-state of Egypt.
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(https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3ZQE4BVUEg4)
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Egypt was the world’s first nation-state rather than city-state. People who shared a common ethnicity and genetics and culture united in one nation.
Another thing to point out is that the world’s longest reigning monarch was Egyptian, Pharaoh Pepi II, who ruled for over ninety years! At least five generations of Egyptians (depending on family) lived their entire lives under this man’s reign! Elizabeth II of the later United Kingdom reigned for roughly the same number of generations, but her reign was twenty years shorter than Pepi’s. I could have expected her to make it up to eighty on the throne, though. She certainly was close! Shed’ve been 106 by that time.
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