The administrative apparatus that had organized Egyptian society for centuries fractured into competing regional powers.

NUE001, had he lived a century or two later, might have been born into a very different Egypt — one without the confident centralized authority of the Old Kingdom, without the massive building programs, without the organized state provisioning of workers and the elaborate administrative hierarchies that made the Old Kingdom spectacular.

He was fortunate, in that narrow sense, to have lived when he did.

The climate that surrounded NUE001’s life — the reliable Nile floods of the mid-third millennium BCE — was not separate from his existence but fundamental to it.