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 dynasties laid the foundations for the political stability of the Old Kingdom, an age of highly centralised royal power that found its greatest expression in the construction of the Pyramids. In this fully illustrated book, A.J. Spencer shows how our knowledge of the Predynastic and Early Dynastic Periods has developed since the early years of this. Century and how new discoveries and recent excavations continue to illuminate this formative era in Egyptian history.