This course traces the political and cultural history of ancient Egypt from the foundation of the unified state around 3,050 BCE, through the cultural highpoints of the fully centralized Old Kingdom and its pyramids (c. 2,680-2,160), the systemic collapse and civil war of the First Intermediate Period (c. 2,160-2,055 BCE), to the end of the Middle Kingdom (c. 1650 BCE), when the re-centralized state gradually evolved into a colonizing power and reached the peak of its literary development. Students use archaeological, architectural, and inscriptional primary sources to reconstruct what can be known with certainty, and to analyze and critically assess scholarly interpretations about Egypt's development from aggregates of small farming communities to one of the world's earliest empire-building states.