Cognitive Foundations of Early Egyptian Civilization:

This paper introduces and applies the Deep Symbolic Systems Model (DSSM) — a cognitive-archaeological framework tracing the emergence of early Egyptian civilization from c. 7500–2500 BCE. Rather than attributing Egypt's rise to environmental advantage, population change, or administrative invention, DSSM argues that state formation was the late-stage outcome of a four-stage process of symbolic consolidation rooted in neuroscience: from embodied bodily routines, through ritualized repetition, to material externalization, and finally institutional offloading. The model's three core innovations are: (1) a falsifiable developmental sequence whose stage-timing is derived from laboratory neuroscience rather than the archaeological record it explains; (2) a neural timescale bridge translating individual memory consolidation into archaeologically detectable windows spanning 100–1,500 years; and (3) a two-dimensional scoring instrument (the Field Companion Protocol) that independently rates evidence strength and symbolic specificity, combining them through a minimum rule to prevent either from masking weakness in the other. Applied to Egypt, FCP scores rise from 4.5/12 (Badarian) to 12/12 (Old Kingdom), reflecting genuine evidential variance rather than assumed progress. Three negative cases — Sub-Saharan Africa, prehistoric Australia, and Late Neolithic Europe — are analyzed as tests of three distinct failure modes, confirming that high symbolic richness without Stage 3 material amplification does not produce institutional emergence. Seven falsifiable predictions are evaluated, including a novel community-size threshold (~500 individuals) for Stage 3 crossing.