Safe harbors and navigable waterways made trade and transport easy and cheap. As each wave of human advance turned from animal husbandry and agriculture to bourgeois practices of industry, commerce and finance, locations at strategic points along trade routes were first occupied by occasional markets and fairs and eventually by trading towns and cities. Geography was a decisive factor.
Fertility was equally important. In the early stages of social development transportation was difficult, dangerous and expensive. Sources of food and building materials were found within a short distance of the growing trade center. Again geography played a decisive role. A deep, sheltered harbor backed by a desert could not attract and support a thriving trade center. Food and raw materials are indispensable to concentrations of human beings.
The Nile Valley, like that of the Ganges and the Yellow River, provided the fertility and transport, the food and raw materials that have sustained concentrated human populations for many thousands of years, forming part of the base for Egyptian, Indian and Chinese civilizations. Animal husbandry and grain farming, coupled with fishing and forestry, made possible the growth of cities and laid the foundations for the nuclei of these civilizations.
Temples, tombs and other public constructs provided the centers around which Egyptian civilization was built. The stone, wood and other raw materials used in the building of these unique examples of human handiwork were floated up and down the Nile from their sources of origin. Annual Nile floods provided silt deposits necessary to fertilize farms and gardens. Nile water, impounded during floods, irrigated the land during the long dry seasons. Banked by deserts, the Nile was a ribbon of fertility running through a largely uninhabited wilderness. The upper reaches of the Nile lay in the mountains of Central Africa. The Nile delta, built up through ages by silt deposits, provided a meeting place where African, European and Asian traders could exchange their wares and lay the foundations for the civilization of lower Egypt. The Nile also provided the means of communication which connected Lower Egypt with Upper Egypt and led, finally, to the unification of the two areas in a long enduring and prestigious Egyptian civilization. Once again geography was laying down the guide lines within which civilizations have been built up and liquidated.
Thus far we have noted the role of physiographic factors that have led to building the nuclei of empires and civilizations. They have been parallelled by social factors as men took advantage of natural opportunities to concentrate, feed and house ever larger human aggregates.
Empires and civilizations have been built up by comparatively large numbers of human beings concentrated in relatively small spaces. Wandering food gatherers and herdsmen ranged widely in search of game and grass. Cultivators settled in villages from which they could work the land. If crops were scanty, population was sparse. Only abundant crops, dependable, season after season, provided the basis for large settled populations.
Large, settled populations, adequately supplied with the essentials of life, enabled human beings to organize social centers in which a comparatively few people, tending their animals and working the land, could release a comparatively large part of the population to devote its time and energy to trade and commerce, to industry and transport, to the arts and sciences and to the organization, direction and administration of large scale enterprises such as government, the military, construction and the mobilization of sufficient labor power to carry on and enlarge their enterprises. In its simplest essence this was politics.
Egyptian government, in its broad sense, rested on a class structured society: the aristocracy, the priesthood, officialdom, businessmen, highly trained scientists and engineers, skilled craftsmen and an immense proletariat consisting of tenant farmers, peons, slaves and war captives.
At the top of the political structure was an absolute monarch who wielded power that was limited only by the ambition, tolerance and loyalty of his associates—nobles, priests, soldiers, businessmen and political advisers, and by the willingness of the rural and urban masses to work and fight for their overlords. A number of the monarchs (Pharaohs) ruled for long periods—up to sixty years. It was during these long reigns that the Egyptian Kingdom was organized, strengthened and unified, the rule of the monarch was safeguarded; ambitious nobles were placated or destroyed; and the leadership succession was determined and assured.
The nucleus of the Egyptian Empire was a dictatorship by a self-perpetuated elite, headed by lords spiritual and temporal. Both groups held land, accumulated wealth and exercised authority. It was a government combining the theory of absolutism with the practice of public responsibility. It was sufficiently arbitrary to get things done. It was sufficiently inclusive to recognize and utilize special ability. It was sufficiently structured to carry on from dynasty to dynasty. It was sufficiently flexible to consolidate scattered communities into the Old Kingdom, to unite Lower and Upper Egypt, to extend its authority into Central Africa, the Near and Middle East and parts of Eastern Europe, thus laying the foundations for history's most extensive and long-lasting civilization during the period 3500 to 500 B.C.