Overlapping of cultures?
Reflections on cultural evolution
When compared to others civilizations of antiquity, Egyptian civilization appears as "frozen." While all others civilizations (and with shorter duration) show continuous cultural, social, language, architectural, etc. evolution. , the Egyptian one, apart from the brief Amarnaean period and the Ptolemaic period of the Library of Alexandria with Eratosthenes, Conon, Calllimachus of Cyrene, etc., remains static, showing no variation in all its parameters, cultures and habits.
It actually shows evidence of decline.
I believe that, in all probability, this is due to the priestly caste that was economically very powerful (they were the ones who collected taxes). They were the custodians of the "knowledge" and, in order to keep their privileges, they defined archetypes from which they could not deviate (something similar happened with the Catholic Church in the Middle Ages. Just think of Galilei!).
This support the hypothesis of an old, knowledge-rich culture that overlapped with a more advanced local population and from which the initial Egyptian culture originated. Even Manetho (in 300 B.C. !) mentioned a period of Gods (survivors of the Flood?), followed by one of Demigods (progeny of these with the local population?) and then Dynasties in which the Pharaoh is a God. This mythological conception was later assimilated by the Greeks as well. Where these gods came from and how their culture was formed still constitutes an exciting question.
The priestly caste may then, over time, have lost real historical knowledge and mythologized what was handed down to them, "freezing" it into precise and unchanging dogmas.
On the other hand, the findings from the Amratian and Gearzan periods (late 4th millennium B.C.), including those from Naquada, indicate a culture that was still backward, belonging to the Neolithic period and with artistic expressions that were still very crude and totally different, in graphic appearance, from those that appear on the fragments of the proto-Dynastic bistro tablets (used to "make up" the statues of the gods) and on that of Narmer, dated to ca. 3200 B.C. and therefore almost contemporary.
In the latter, moreover, all the graphic elements typical of Egyptian culture, which will be handed down through the centuries, are already present. If we then bear in mind that in the first dynasties the written language was already fully codified (Hieratic and Demotic are only graphic simplifications of a language unchanged over time, which certainly does not present the evolution that, for example exist between Latin and Italian), geometry was known (otherwise, the pyramids?), astronomy, including the period of the precession of the equinoxes (26000 years!), etc, the question of how a civilization could have such an advanced evolution in a very short period, without any external intervention, arises. And the only logical answer is overlapping cultures.
There is, however, a temporal contradiction of no easy solution. If, as seems proven by a number of clues such as: the type of erosion of the body of the Sphinx, which geologists attribute solely to torrential rains, the dating by pollen examination of the inner cores of the three pyramids of Giza, the astronomical one of Bauval, the type of cyclopean boulder structure of the ancient Temple wall in the valley and that of the Osireion, the oldest monuments of Egypt dated back to the tenth millennium B.C, how is it possible that in the fourth there is evidence of a Neolithic type of civilization, definitely much more backward? Then again, in a period of six thousand years, many things could have happened. The progress of civilization does not always take place in a homogeneous way (just think of our Middle Ages), and therefore a regression cannot be excluded and overlapping cultures were more than one.
