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Let’s get back to the wagon. The analogy isn’t bad, actually. The achievement of civilization, however arbitrarily we define it, was not an event; it was a process, and a complicated process at that. A number of factors were responsible. The concept of stimulus diffusion, which we mentioned above, was undoubtedly one of those factors, but the idea of writing wouldn’t have caught on unless the borrowing culture had reached a stage of development in which the new concept was understood and desired. In terms of our analogy, both a change in terrain and a push are needed to get the wagon going; the stimulus would not be felt if the circumstances were adverse.

Because people like simple answers, scholars once postulated a “dynastic race” whose people entered Egypt at the end of the prehistoric period, bringing with them the gifts of civilization. They unified the land and, like the Normans in En gland, ruled the conquered indigenes as a racially distinct noble class, before interbreeding produced a single people. The dynastic race came from Asia—a large place, but one cannot summarize the conflicting theories of origin more precisely than that. They spoke a Semitic language, which mingled with the Hamitic (African) tongue of the natives to produce the Egyptian speech.

The term “race” is out of favor, and rightly so. Anthropologists use it to delimit certain groups of human beings in terms of “nonessential” differences—skin color, hair texture, shape of skull, and so on. Study of predynastic skeletons suggest that they may belong to several different physical subtypes, but we can’t be sure who these people were, where they came from, or what they actually did. All sorts of people came into Egypt, from prehistoric times onward—merchants, traders, invading armies, immigrants, envoys. We will see them coming, and sometimes going, as we follow the long centuries of Egyptian history, and once we get well into history proper we can document foreign influences more accurately. But in preliterate cultures we don’t have written records, or even much material. Often the evidence for a “race of invaders” consists of cultural changes, which, in prehistoric societies, primarily means new kinds of pots. I have a prejudice against this sort of argument. I get idiotic mental images of invading armies brandishing pots, which they thrust threateningly into the trembling hands of the conquered indigenes. Current thinking, I am pleased to report, denies the dynastic race and the waves of invaders. Cultural change can result from trade as well as conquest, and the more we learn about predynastic cultures the more we see continuity and interrelationships.

This has been an unsatisfactory sort of discussion; instead of answering questions, it raises new ones. But this is the subject matter of prehistoric archaeology, when it goes beyond the simple cataloging of bones and pottery. The questions raised are important questions. If they are ever answered, we will learn much, not only about Egypt, but also about the human animal in general. The scope of the problem is universal, and the answers deal with man himself.

The beginning of history in Egypt is signalized by a noteworthy event—the unification of the country into a single nation, whose boundaries ran from the sea in the north to the first cataract of Aswan. We know very little about political organization before this consolidation. We assume that the small tribal units of the early predynastic gradually amalgamated and formed larger social and political groupings. At one time Egypt may have been made up of several dozen little states, each ruled by a prince or a chief. Through conquest and marriage and the other techniques of imperialism the smaller units were eventually joined into larger kingdoms. We have now ambled into the late predynastic period, aka the Protodynastic, Naqada III, or according to some people, Dynasty O.

A lot more is known about this period than was the case thirty years ago. One of the most fascinating