This article supports the tendency among Egyptologists to classify ancient Kemet as a nation. In so doing, it challenges the modernist and postmodernist assertion that the nation first emerged in the West during the 18th and 19th centuries. It conceptualizes the nation in two ways: as the coincidence of common ethnicity and clearly defined territory—the nation-state; and more simply, as an entity that claims the right to control a state. Kemet’s war of national liberation—the expulsion of the Hyksos during the Second Intermediate Period—illustrates the former conceptualization of the nation. However, the common ethnic identity that had been nurtured since unification was not a major factor in the civil war during the First Intermediate Period. Consequently, this quest for reunification is an example of the nation as a political movement.
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