The 4th millennium BC spanned the years 4000 BC to 3001 BC. Some of the major changes in human culture during this time included the beginning of the Bronze Age and the invention of writing, which played a major role in starting recorded history.
The city states of Sumer and the (Predynastic) Kingdom of Egypt were established and grew to prominence. Agriculture spread widely across Eurasia.
Narmer (Ancient Egyptian: nꜥr-mr, may mean "painful catfish", "stinging catfish", "harsh catfish", or "fierce catfish"; fl. c. 3100 BC) was an ancient Egyptian king of the Early Dynastic Period, whose reign began at the end of the 4th millennium BC. He's believed to have been the successor to the Protodynastic king Ka. Many scholars consider him the unifier of Egypt and founder of the First Dynasty, and in turn the first king of a unified Egypt. He also had a prominently noticeable presence in Canaan, compared to his predecessors and successors. Neithhotep is thought to be his queen consort or his daughter.
A majority of Egyptologists believe that Narmer was the same person as Menes.
The Egyptian language, or Ancient Egyptian (r n kmt; 'speech of Egypt'), is an extinct branch of the Afro-Asiatic language family that was spoken in ancient Egypt. It is known today from a large corpus of surviving texts, which were made accessible to the modern world following the decipherment of the ancient Egyptian scripts in the early 19th century.
Egyptian is one of the earliest known written languages, first recorded in the hieroglyphic script in the late 4th millennium BC. It is also the longest-attested human language, with a written record spanning over 4,000 years. Its classical form, known as "Middle Egyptian," served as the vernacular of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt and remained the literary language of Egypt until the Roman period.
Cuba, officially the Republic of Cuba, is an island country in the Caribbean. It comprises 4,195 islands, islets and cays, including the eponymous main island and Isla de la Juventud. Situated at the confluence of the Caribbean Sea, Gulf of Mexico, and Atlantic Ocean, Cuba is located east of the Yucatán Peninsula, south of both Florida (the United States) and the Bahamas, west of Hispaniola (Haiti and the Dominican Republic), and north of Jamaica and the Cayman Islands. Havana is the largest city and capital. Cuba is the third-most populous country in the Caribbean after Haiti and the Dominican Republic, with about 10 million inhabitants. It is the largest country in the Caribbean by area. Culturally, Cuba is considered part of Latin America.
Cuba was inhabited as early as the fourth millennium BC, with the Guanahatabey and Taíno peoples present at the time of Spanish colonization in the 15th century. Cuba remained part of the Spanish Empire until the Spanish–American War of 1898, after which it was occupied by the United States and gained independence in 1902. A 1933 coup toppled the democratically elected government of Carlos Manuel de Céspedes y Quesada and began a long period of military influence, particularly by Fulgencio Batista. In 1940, Cuba implemented a new constitution, but mounting political unrest culminated in the 1952 Cuban coup d'état by Batista. His autocratic government was overthrown in January 1959 by the 26th of July Movement during the Cuban Revolution. That revolution established communist rule under the leadership of Fidel Castro. The country under Castro was a point of contention during the Cold War between the Soviet Union and the United States, and the Cuban Missile Crisis of 1962 is widely considered the closest the Cold War came to escalating into nuclear war.
An arch is a curved vertical structure spanning an open space underneath it. Arches may support the load above them, or they may perform a purely decorative role. As a decorative element, the arch dates back to the 4th millennium BC, but structural load-bearing arches became popular only after their adoption by the Ancient Romans in the 4th century BC.
Arch-like structures can be horizontal, like an arch dam that withstands a horizontal hydrostatic pressure load. Arches are usually used as supports for many types of vaults, with the barrel vault in particular being a continuous arch. Extensive use of arches and vaults characterizes an arcuated construction, as opposed to the trabeated system, where, like in the architectures of ancient Greece, China, and Japan (as well as the modern steel-framed technique), posts and beams dominate.
Banwari Trace, an Archaic (pre-ceramic) site in southwestern Trinidad, is the oldest archaeological site in the Caribbean. The site has revealed two separate periods of occupation; one between 7200 and 6100 BP (Strata I and II) and the other between 6100 BP and 5500 BP.
Cosmetic palettes are archaeological artifacts, originally used in predynastic Egypt to grind and apply ingredients for facial or body cosmetics. The decorative palettes of the late 4th millennium BCE appear to have lost this function and became commemorative, ornamental, and possibly ceremonial. They were made almost exclusively out of siltstone with a few exceptions. The siltstone originated from quarries in the Wadi Hammamat.
Many of the palettes were found at Hierakonpolis, a centre of power in pre-dynastic Upper Egypt. After the unification of the country, the palettes ceased to be included in tomb assemblages.