The Nome Polities in Egypt and Mesopotamia in the Fourth and Third Millennia BC

Anyone going to speak about the Egyptian nome polities of the Predynastic period, when they are expected to have existed as independent entities, might easily hear that they are going to talk about something that probably really existed but is virtually unobservable with means of optics at our disposal. In fact, the word ‘nome’ (νομός) was introduced by Herodotus (II. 164) to denote the regions (Egyptian spt) of Persian-governed Egypt, which were just small provinces, as presented in sources from the earliest times, apart from the epochs of country's dissipation during the so-called ‘intermediate periods’. Even then, not every nome gained independence, as autonomous structures of those times often comprised several nomes. Nevertheless, each nome was denoted by a sign of a sacred standard with a specific symbol over it, having as its center a larger town with an old and renowned temple. So it was natural to infer that their history went back to the most ancient times when nomes could be real inchoate Predynastic polities of the fourth Millennium BC. (This actually led Igor Diakonoff to transplant the term ‘nome’ in his account of Early Dynastic Mesopotamia.) But by the end of the twentieth century, the scheme of 22 Upper and 20 Lower Egyptian nome states mingling together into two big entities, with Upper Egypt finally conquering Lower, was abandoned in favour of a more nuanced notion based on well-considered archaeological evidence