Around 6000 BC or so, when the Sahara is still a savanna, these Neolithic ancestors of the Egyptian people have set their first sights on the fertile floodplains of the Nile Valley. And so begins a long saga of history and civilization.

There was a bit of a challenge in getting these characters to look recognizably "Egyptian" even though they would have been wearing typically prehistoric attire at this stage. So I chose to give the beads in their necklace colors that would hopefully evoke Egypt (blue, turquoise, and a bit of red) and gave the guy a primitive falcon pendant on his back to represent the Egyptian god Heru/Horus. The spears though have flint heads based on actual Egyptian ones from 4000-3000 BC.

I originally planned to have the whole picture inked, but then I decided that leaving out lines and detail for the background would make it seem more distant. Therefore the approach I settled on was to have only the people and their foreground inked whereas the rest would be "painted" without lines.