I guess that brings us a bit back in time, even to Paleoliticum and Neolithicum in the Nile valley. Now were talking hunters and food gatherers. Signs of these have been found in the form of primitive stone tools like handaxes and the like. There has been found at Nag Ahmed el-Khalifa south of Abydos such tools dating from ca 200.000 bc (mid-Pleistocene). And if we make a great jump forward in time to ca 33.000 bc, we find that flint was mined from trenches ca 2 metres down into the ground south of Assiut. At this time the technique of making tools was much more advanced than the earlier crude hand axes.

Evidence for human presence in the Nile valley is lacking between 11.000 and 8.000 bc but re-emerge at the end of this period. At this time most people lived in small tribes, wandering around, hunting and gathering. When did they start to put seeds in the ground and wait for them to grow enough to be harvested? The earliest finds of grains are dated to the Badarian Period (ca 5.500-4.000 bc) but that doesn´t have to mean that people became agrarian all of a sudden and all over the place. The habit must have spread slowly, perhaps with people noticing that if you planted something, it would yield a small crops during the next season. So in the beginning it must have been small scale, with the family/tribe still nomadic, returning with regular intervals to pick the harvest. Later it became neccessary to stay and protect the crops from being taken by others - and now we can begin think in terms of land areas which were a pre-stage to village- and much later, city formations. It´s interesting to think of how the concept of deities could enter into this all.

More thoughts and considerations are welcome!