Egyptians may have learned the concept of writing from Mesopotamia, but in place of cuneiform, they developed their own script.

Egyptian written records before 2400 B. C. E. are thin but they do provide a list of , or administrative districts, suggesting the structure of the Egyptian state as early as 2900 B. C. E.

By the time of the unification of Egypt in 3300 B. C. E., perhaps under Narmer, the king was becoming a god responsible for maintaining , justice and order, throughout the kingdom.

Within a few years of coming to the throne, King Amenhotep IV challenged the order of ancient Egypt by adopting a new religion and abandoning his dynastic name in favor of Akhenaten ("he who serves Aten").

In the third dynasty, 2649-2575, as a forerunner to the development of , Egyptian King Djoser has a mastaba built to hold his remains at death.

Before the excavations that revealed the existence of the Harappan civilization, scholars had believed that the civilization of India had begun in the valley.

An older opinion--that the Indus civilization was destroyed by the invasion of peoples from somewhere northwest of India--is now less widely held.

The , one of the earliest and most important Arayan religious texts, tells of the destructive power of the god Indra.

To claim and maintain their own supremacy, the Aryans may have elaborated the social structures of the system and relegated the native inhabitants to permanent low status within it.

Harappa, with its antecedents going back to , according to one scholar, was not a derivative of Mesopotamia but ha d grown up indigenously.