Early Egypt

The emergence, around 3000 BC, of a complex civilisation in Egypt is the story of rapid advances in art, technology, and social organisation. The adoption of agriculture some two thousand years earlier had freed the earlier inhabitants of the Nile Valley from hunting and gathering, a lifestyle that had persisted for a quarter million years. Settled communities of farmers gradually coalesced into urban centres under local rulers. Eventually the country was unified, and. Under the first pharaohs the character of Egyptian civilisation was established. The substantial achievements of the early…