The state and the city were born in fourth millennium BC Mesopotamia, leading the way to trade routes and empires, awakening the lands around it. Around 3000 BC, Egypt created the first territorial nation state in human history, consisting of the Nile Valley north of the first cataract and the Nile Delta on the shores of the Mediterranean. The whole area was governed by a king whose lineage created kingship, while building up a bureaucracy managing the country so that, in the late second millennium BC, Egypt was the greatest of the great powers when international politics were born. This volume hints at the political context of these earliest international relations, and examines how the system functioned. It also explores what can be said of ancient Egyptian society – and stresses the contributions that Egypt made to our own contemporary world. As one of the two earliest major civilisations, Egypt contributed to the birth of warfare, literature, art, science, economics, ideology, love poetry and much more.