Abstract
Considered one of the world’s earliest examples of a pristine state, the ancient Egyptian state arose by ca. 3000 BC. State formation in Egypt became a focus of much research in the 1970s and 1980s, as investigations of the Predynastic period in Egypt, when complex society arose there, began to uncover new evidence of the indigenous roots of this phenomenon. More recently, archaeological investigations in the Delta as well as continued work in southern Egypt have provided new evidence for the changes that took place in the fourth millennium BC. But the specific events and processes involved in this major sociopolitical and economic transformation and the resultant state still remain incompletely understood. To better understand the problem in Egypt, this study looks at the contrasting polities in fourth millennium BC Egypt and Nubia from the perspective of the political economy and the strategies to power proposed by the dual-processual theory, which also helps elucidate processes of state formation and the type of early state that developed there. The territorial expansionist model helps explain where and when this state first emerged.
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Acknowledgments
I would like to thank David Carballo, my former graduate student and now Boston University colleague, for first suggesting the role of the political economy in prestate Egypt and Nubia, in a paper he wrote for a graduate seminar in 1999. Rodolfo Fattovich, my colleague of so many excavation seasons in Ethiopia and Egypt, read and commented on an earlier draft of this paper, for which I am grateful. I would also like to thank five anonymous reviewers who offered insightful suggestions for revisions as well as expanding the content of this paper, as did Gary Feinman.
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Bard, K.A. Political Economies of Predynastic Egypt and the Formation of the Early State. J Archaeol Res 25, 1–36 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-016-9095-6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10814-016-9095-6