The Nile is not a border. This is the simplest version of the argument and also the one that should require the least explanation. The Nile flows from the interior of Africa northward to the Mediterranean. The civilizations along its length were in constant contact, trading, fighting, exchanging people and ideas and religious concepts and agricultural techniques across what was not a separation but a connection. The civilization of ancient Egypt did not emerge in isolation. It emerged in relationship with the Nubian civilizations to its south, some of whose cultures predated the unification of Egypt, which contributed to and drew from Egyptian culture across millennia. The kings of Kush would eventually rule Egypt as its 25th Dynasty. And across the centuries that followed, Kushite civilization would leave behind something that still surprises people today. More pyramids. In what is now Sudan. Built by the civilization that the Western imagination has most completely erased. There are more ancient pyramids in Sudan than in Egypt. Most people reading that sentence right now are encountering it for the first time. That is not because the information is obscure. It is because the information does not fit a story that someone needed to be true. And the information that does not fit the story does not make it into the classroom.