Unification of Egypt
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According to Egyptian tradition, the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt took place around 3100 BCE, when the king of the south conquered the north and took the double crown of the two lands. Archaeology points the same way: the royal tombs at Abydos predate the written record, and the palette of Narmer, found at Hierakonpolis, shows a king wearing the red crown of Lower Egypt on one side and the white crown of Upper Egypt on the other as he smites an enemy. The priest Manetho, writing in Ptolemaic Egypt, called the first king Menes, and later tradition identified him with Narmer or with Narmer's successor Aha. Unification created the political and religious framework that lasted three thousand years: the pharaoh was the living Horus, later the son of Ra, and owed maat, order and justice, to the two lands. The capital moved between Memphis in the north and Thebes in the south, while the double crown, the titulary and the calendar all expressed the union of the two kingdoms. Trade routes to Nubia, the Sinai and the Levant expanded, irrigation along the Nile was coordinated, and a scribal bureaucracy recorded harvests and labour in the newly invented hieroglyphic script.