kerma

But the residents of capitals known as Kerma, Napata and Meroe produced temples, palaces and pyramids filled with pottery, metalwork, furniture and sculpture.

Now, as a proportion of the combined revenues of the ten largest firms in each country, Kerma Partners calculates that the Big Four’s aggregate market penetration ranges from 4% in China and 6% in Britain to 20% in Germany and 30% in Spain.

To Michael Roch of Kerma Partners, an outfit that advises professional-services firms, the Big Four are “the biggest underestimated threat to the legal profession today”.

The early-20th-century archaeologist George Reisner, for instance, identified large burial mounds at the site of Kerma as the remains of high Egyptian officials instead of those of Nubian kings.

The Hyksos invaders from southwest Asia held the Nile Delta and much of the north, and a wealthy Nubian kingdom at Kerma, on the Upper Nile, encroached from the south.