The earliest farmers in Egypt appeared approximately 7,000 years ago, during what is called the Fayum A culture — people who cultivated emmer wheat and barley and kept sheep and goats in the oasis environment of the Fayum Depression, southwest of modern Cairo.

These farmers were themselves part of the broader spread of Neolithic farming traditions from the Fertile Crescent into North Africa, and their arrival introduced the Near Eastern-related genetic component that is visible in Egyptian populations from this period onward.

Over the following millennia, a sequence of archaeological cultures in the Nile Valley — the Badarian, the Naqada I, II, and III — show the progressive development of more complex social organization, more elaborate funerary practices, more sophisticated craft production, and eventually the emergence of regional political centers that competed for dominance over the valley.

The Naqada cultures are particularly important because they show the direct precursors of many features of the Dynastic Egyptian state.