Five thousand years ago, a kingdom emerged on the banks of the Nile. The "Two Lands" of Southern and Northern Egypt slowly unified, and rulers like Narmer established their authority. The origins of the kingdom are murky, but archaeology can uncover secrets. In this episode, we meet the first ruler of the land, get a sense of Egypt and its people, and introduce the podcast as a whole. Welcome!

Date: circa 3050 – 3000 BCE.

Kings: Narmer, Scorpion (epilogue).

The History of Egypt Podcast website.

Support the show at www.patreon.com/egyptpodcast.

Episode Music by Keith Zizza www.keithzizza.com.

Select Bibliography:

Kathryn A. Bard, An Introduction to the Archaeology of Ancient Egypt, 2nd edition, 2015.

Eugenia D’Atanasio et al., “The Peopling of the Last Green Sahara Revealed by High-Coverage Resequencing of Trans-Saharan Patrilineages,” Genome Biology 19.20 (2018): 1–15.

Gunter Dreyer, “Tomb U-j: A Royal Burial of Dynasty 0 at Abydos,” in Emily Teeter (ed.) Before the Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization, 2011: 127-36.

A.J. Spencer, Early Egypt: The Rise of Civilization in the Nile Valley, 1993.

Barry J. Kemp, Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, 3rd edition, 2018.

David O’Connor, Abydos: Egypt’s First Pharaohs and the Cult of Osiris, 2011.

John Romer, A History of Ancient Egypt from the First Farmers to the Great Pyramid, 2013.

Alice Stevenson, “Material Culture of the Predynastic Period,” in Emily Teeter (ed.) Before the Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization, 2011: 65-74.

David Wengrow, “Landscapes of Knowledge, Idioms of Power: The African Foundations of Ancient Egyptian Civilization Reconsidered,” in David O’Connor and Andrew Reid (eds) Ancient Egypt in Africa, 2003: 121-36.

David Wengrow, The Archaeology of Early Egypt: Social Transformations in North-East Africa, 10,000 to 2650 BC, 2006.

Robert J. Wenke, The Ancient Egyptian State: The Origins of Egyptian Culture (c. 8000 – 2000 BC), 2009.

Toby A.H. Wilkinson, Early Dynastic Egypt, 1999.

Bruce B. Williams, “Relations Between Egypt and Nubia in the Predynastic Period,” in Emily Teeter (ed.) Before the Pyramids: The Origins of Egyptian Civilization, 2011: 83-92.

Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices