The World's First (Cuddly) State

A History of Mankind (12)

From around 3000 BC, Egypt was the world's first truly integrated state, with a single ruler whose control stretched from the Nile Delta to the first Nile cataract at Aswan, for millennia the rough boundary between Egypt proper and Nubia, the next region down the river — often an Egyptian client state and always intensely influenced by Egyptian culture …