began to emerge only with the stumbling steps of crude pictographic writing at about 3000 BC.8 At that time Egypt consisted of a string of villages and small city-states strung out for 500 miles along the Nile valley and even then divided between Lower Egypt (or Delta Egypt) in the north and Upper Egypt in the south (see map 1). Unification of these scattered sites and of the whole nation occurred around 3000 BC in connection with what Manetho, an early Egyptian historian, described as Dynasty 1.