Hi everybody, from Wondery, welcome to another episode of Tides of History.

So I've been fascinated by Ancient Egypt since I was a kid.

Seeing pictures of mummies and pyramids and hieroglyphs was just so cool and it's

so different from what we know.

I'd imagine a lot of you felt the same, Egypt's fascinating.

Whether it's because of the mummies or the pyramids or just the way we learn about

the past, Ancient Egypt often seems to be synonymous with the pharaohs, the rulers of the two

lands.

And yet we know that there were times before pyramids and before pharaohs, before Egypt

even existed as a concept.

On top of that, Egypt wasn't isolated at any point in time.

It was deeply tied to the more southern reaches of the Nile Valley, to the deserts on either

side, and of course to the other societies of the Near East.

The Egypt of the pharaohs was shaped by its more distant past and by the contemporary

world around it.

So to help us understand Egypt and its place in the human past, we've got a great guest

for you here today.

He's a professor of comparative archaeology at University College London, who focuses

on the archaeology of Northeastern Africa, the Middle East, and the Eastern Mediterranean.

In that capacity, he's one of the world's experts on pre-dynastic Egypt and its development

and the author of the Archaeology of Early Egypt, Social Transformations in Northeastern

Africa, 10,000 to 2650 BC, which I relied on heavily in my episodes on the topic.

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