ABSTRACT
The foundation of the unified Egyptian state under the First Dynasty of kings was arguably the single most important political event of the past fifty centuries, anywhere in the world. It marked the beginning of the end of a world which, with relatively minor variations, had endured since Lower Palaeolithic times, a million years or so earlier. Then the ancestors of modern humans and later fully modern Homo sapiens sapiens lived in small communities, bound by common loyalties, with a simple system of community management which, by Neolithic times, probably operated consciously by consensus. A new world began with the recognition of the kingship in Egypt, the emergence of elites and the subsequent creation of the nation-state, of which the king was represented as the divinely-endowed ruler, supported by a highly organized and effective bureaucracy, with the means to organize large-scale projects which both required substantial resources and also stimulated their development. Thus was changed, fundamentally and for all time, the management of human societies. In the future the spoils would go to those societies which adopted the type of structure which the Egyptians first conceived – we still live with the results of that initiative, for better or for worse, to the present day.
