The Old Kingdom of Ancient Egypt was the first permanently centralized ethno-national state in world history. Like any such entity, it meets the challenges of order and governance needs by building a centralized administration in provincial places. It is subordinate to the capital elite and the pharaoh, but at the same time it functions more or less independently in operational terms.
The early research presented here by the renowned Egyptian-Australian scholar Naguib Kanawati (b. 1941) traces the formation and development of the provincial administration of Upper Egypt and the institution of the vizier.