4. Who Built the Pyramids?

Trade and the Rise of Cities

‘On the first side of the slate we see the large figure of the king, grasping the hair of an enemy in the left hand, and preparing to smite him with a mace held in the right. Behind the king is his body-servant, as on the mace-head. In front is the royal hawk holding a cord which passes through the lip of a captive. The plants beneath the hawk are the hieroglyphs for 6000, showing the number of prisoners.’¹

This is how the British Egyptologist James E. Quibell describes his discovery in 1898 of what has become known as the Narmer Palettes. The two 63-centrimeter-tall, beautifully preserved palettes show King Narmer wearing the crown of Upper Egypt on one and the crown of Lower Egypt on the other. The presence of both Upper and Lower Egypt is the reason many scholars believe that Narmer, who ruled somewhere between 3200 and 3000 BCE, was the first king of a unified Egypt and thus founder of the First Dynasty.

But the palettes offer tantalising clues of more than just Egypt’s political history. It describes a stratified society, with a king and servants and captives. It describes warfare and writing. Carved from a single piece of flat, soft dark grey-green siltstone (Quibell wrongly described it as ‘slate’) and mostly used for grinding cosmetics, the palettes represent the work of miners, stone masons, soldiers, artisans, scribes, and priests. Egypt in the fourth millennium was clearly more complex than the simple agricultural society we painted in the previous chapter.

That is because the shift to farming, specialisation, surplus production and trade allowed urbanisation. Non-farming specialists like blacksmiths, potters and tailors had every reason to live in close proximity, so that when the farmers brought their surplus production to market, they could trade with all the specialists in one place. This meant that villages developed in those areas where such specialists would gather and trade – a market – typically a place that was easy to access and close to a water source. This, in a very stylised way, is how towns and cities were established in the ancient world.

And, as the Narmer Palettes so vividly illustrate, we also neglected a crucial component that characterises the emergence of civilisations: rulers. The surpluses these farmers produced also had to be protected, either from animals or, more commonly, from other humans. This necessitated a system of defence and, consequently, the emergence of another specialist: the soldier. Armies required leadership, which gave rise to more complicated forms of social organisation. Instead of the egalitarian structure of the hunter-gatherer societies, agricultural societies typically had strong social hierarchies. Inequality was thus born.

But, just like in Chapter 3, here is another timing conundrum: Grains were first domesticated 10,000 BCE, yet the first cities and states – Nippur and Uruk in Sumer, for example, or Memphis in Egypt – would only emerge in the fourth and third millennium BCE. Why would it take several millennia for such complex societies to emerge?

Before we answer why cities emerged when they did, perhaps we should reflect first on the purpose of a state. Political philosophers posit two theories about why governments emerge, one from the ‘demand side’ and one from the ‘supply side’.

The demand-side theory suggests governments arise because they provide public goods and resolve disputes. This theory, rooted in the philosopher John Locke's concept of a ‘social contract,’ proposes that citizens willingly trade some freedoms and resources, like taxes, for the government’s commitment to uphold order and protect rights such as life and liberty.

Conversely, the supply-side theory, associated with the philosophers Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, views governments as tools for elite resource extraction. Here, governments form not for the public benefit but for control over resources, benefiting the ruling class. Although they acknowledge that public goods provision can result from negotiations between different social groups, this only happens to maintain control and prevent uprisings, rather than from altruistic motives.

Which of these two theories best explains the emergence of the first states?

A 2023 paper by economic historians Robert Allen, Mattia Bertazzini and Leander Heldring examines ancient Mesopotamia to test these theories.² Some of the first cities – places like Abu Salabikh, Nippur, Ur and Uruk – emerged in the floodplains between the Euphrates and Tigris rivers of modern-day southern Iraq. But over the centuries, these rivers changed course. The authors use one such shift around 2850 BCE as a case study to test their hypothesis. They propose that when a river shifted and moved away from a farming area, it could have created a demand for government. This is because farming in this region relied on irrigation, and the sudden river shift would require cooperative efforts among distinct communities to build longer canals for re-irrigation. If a government emerges where the river shifted away, it suggests that the demand for coordination and public goods, like irrigation, causes the formation of a state (the demand-side theory).

However, the disappearance of the tax base due to the river shift could have weakened the incentives for elites to extract resources, possibly leading to the formation of governments where the river had now shifted. If a government is more likely to form where the river shifted towards, this might imply that elites are setting up governments primarily to maintain control over resources (the supply-side theory).

Allen, Bertazzini and Heldring test these theories by collecting archaeological data from various periods and locations, comparing areas directly affected by a river shift to those where access to water remained unchanged. The results indicate that a river shift led to an increase in the probability of that area becoming part of a state, an increase in public good provision (e.g., irrigation canals, defensive walls), and an increase in resource flow to the government (e.g., tribute payment). Although many historical states have been extractive, the authors suggest that governments initially emerged because of the need for public goods. Only once they had some enforcement power could such power be used for repression or extraction.

If states emerge to solve collection action problems, why, then, did cities and civilizations not emerge earlier sooner? Why would have to wait until the Bronze Age of the fourth millennia BCE?

The answer is in the name – the ‘Bronze’ Age. In a 2024 working paper, four economists propose that the discovery of bronze enabled our ancestors to move from simple agrarian villeages into complex, urban civilizations.³ Bronze is an alloy made primarily with copper and tin. These two metals are naturally found in regions far away from each other. To make bronze, then, necessitated long-distance trade.

But because of mountains, rivers and coast lines, long-distance trade had to take geography into account. In fact, there were certain places that were natural bottlenecks – places where trade routes were forced to go through because no alternative existed. The authors propose that it is precisely in these bottlenecks that a new elite emerged to tax the traders, just like the resource-extracting, supply-side theory of government predicts. It is in these places that new city-states emerged, ultimately becoming the capital cities for the great civilizations of antiquity.

To test this hypothesis, the authors first map out the Bronze Age metal trade network to determine the trade bottlenecks – or ‘road knots’ – between copper and tin mines. Using sophisticated econometric techniques, they then show that these ‘road knots’ best predict where cities – what the archaeologist Gordon Childe called the ‘Urban Revolution’ – would emerge: large settlements, monumental public works, a specialized ruling class exempt from manual tasks, a system of recording used in the production process, written documents, and artistic expression.⁴ Though the Sumerians of Mesopotamia were first, the Longshan culture of northern China, the Indus Valley in modern-day Pakistan and northern India and ancient Egypt all experienced an Urban Revolution by the fourth millennium BCE.

It was Childe who, almost a century ago, first made the claim that the long-distance trade between the Nile and the Red Sea was responsible for the origins of the Egyptian state: ‘Some favorably situated villages grew into real towns, and the chief of one of them, Abydos, that commanded one main caravan route to the Red Sea and the East, was eventually able to master the whole land to the Mediterranean coasts, founding what is termed the First Dynasty’.⁵ Although Abydos would become the burial site of King Narmer and many pharaohs that followed – the Abydos kings list, with the names of the first 76 pharaohs, can be found on a wall of the Temple of Seti I, built in the thirteenth century BCE – it would be another city on the trade route, Memphis, close to modern-day Cairo, that would become the capital of Ancient Egypt. Here, in 2780 BCE, the first pyramid was built, a step pyramid made by placing six moulds, each smaller than the one beneath, in a stack on top of one another. But fashions change. Within a century, with the arrival of the Fourth Dynasty, the step pyramid style made way for the smooth-sided pyramid. This style would become the blueprint for the Great Pyramid of Giza, built around 2600 BCE, the oldest and most complete of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. It is still a striking fact that more time elapsed between the construction of the Great Pyramid of Giza and the birth of Cleopatra in 70 BCE than from Cleopatra’s time to today.

But who built these giant monuments of antiquity really? How could these agrarian societies do so without modern science and technology? Was it really the Egyptians, or was someone – or something – else involved?

Search this online, and you’ll quickly yourself in conspiracy land! Countless books by pseudoarchaeologists claim that ancient people lacked the knowledge and means to achieve these monumental feats. The implication: there must have been some extraterrestrial involvement. It was aliens!

But these ideas almost always neglect the diversity of archaeological, linguistic and, increasingly, genetic evidence that helps us uncover these questions. In fact, reviewing the latest evidence suggests we have to go back much further in time, to the high point of the Last Glacial Age, around 18,000 BCE.⁶

It was around this time that proto-Afrasian people from the Ethiopian highlands began harvesting wild grains. We know this because historical linguists can trace the term for a small-sickle-shaped stone blade, used in cutting of these wild grains, to the earliest languages that evolved around this time. Further evidence comes from an archaeological find of such a blade in the Ethiopian city of Dire Dawa, dated to 16,000 BCE. From here, this ‘technology’ of wild grain harvesting spread to the Qadan culture of Nubia and the Afian culture of Egypt. In his book, Ancient Africa, Christopher Ehret concludes: ‘Over the whole of the long period from 15,000 BCE down to much later times, changes in particular elements of culture did take place in the lands along and around the Egyptian Nile itself and, because of changing Nile flood behaviours, changes also in the patterns of habitation and residence. But, overall, the archaeology of the Egyptian regions presents a picture of broad cultural and economic continuity extending down from the Afian period into the Holocene epoch.’⁷

In fact, most recent research, now using genetic markers, suggests that this continuity persisted all the way until the adoption of cultivated grains and the Urban Revolution. The distribution of the DNA haplogroup E-M35 DNA, for example, confirms what the linguists and archaeologists have hypothesised: The origins of a specific DNA marker broadly in the Horn of Africa and East Africa, spreading to Egypt in the eras before farming and from there to the areas of the Levant where the pre-proto-Smeitic branch of the Afrasian family was spoken. Today, a significant proportion of Palestinians and Jewish male lineages are E-M35. Another branch also spread to North Africa and the Sahara, where it remains common among Amazigh (Berber) speakers.

In short, aliens did not build the more than a hundred pyramids in Egypt. No, these monumental tombs were built by an urbanised, stratified, literate, long-distance trading society – with deep roots in the Horn of Africa.

Says Ehret: ‘Ancient Egypt was in Africa. More important, ancient Egypt was of Africa.’⁸

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1. J. E. Quibell, Hierakonpolis pt. I. Plates of discoveries in 1898 by J. E. Quibell, with notes by W. M. F. Petrie, Quaritch, 1900, p. 10.

2. Allen, Robert C., Mattia C. Bertazzini, and Leander Heldring. "The economic origins of government." American Economic Review 113, no. 10 (2023): 2507-2545.

3. Flückiger, Matthias, Mario Larch, Markus Ludwig, and Luigi Pascali. "The Dawn of Civilization Metal Trade and the Rise of Hierarchy." (2024). Working Paper No. 1878. Universitat Pompeu Fabra.

4. Childe, V. Gordon. "The urban revolution." The town planning review 21, no. 1 (1950): 3-17.

5. Childe, Gordon. 1930. The Bronze Age. Cambridge University Press.

6. The next section relies heavily on Ehret, Christopher. ‘Ancient Africa: A Global History to 300 CE’. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2023.

7. Ehret, p. 96 and 97.

8. Ehret, p. 83.