Land of the Pharaohs: Egypt

·        In the Neolithic Age the people of Nile moved toward civilization like Sumer.

·        Egyptian civilization was more stable than Mesopotamia.

·        The Egyptian civilization grew in a thin strip of fertile land where the Nile crosses the North African desert.

·        Egypt runs along the lower parts of the Nile’s four thousand mile course from Central Africa to the Mediterranean.

·        Egypt was divided into two sections called the Ancient Egypts.

·        Upper Egypt is a narrow strip of fertile land that is 5 thousand miles in length.

·        Lower Egypt is a fan-shaped pattern of waterways formed by the Nile.

·        Labor and life depended off of its annual flooding and receding, and the gift of the Nile to provide the wealth for the earliest Egyptian civilization.

·        The two lands were unified under a single king around 3100 B.C.

·        This king is known as a pharaoh, a ruler of ancient Egypt.

·        The Egyptians recognized no hard and fast boundary between humans and gods.

·        The Egyptians believed that the pharaoh had to be obeyed as a man given power by the gods and ventured as a god among them.

·        The pharaoh had awesome responsibility and power.

·        Every pharaoh was identified in three different ways with three country’s ruling deities.

·        Thousands of priests served the gods and goddesses daily in the hundreds of temples along the two lands. 

·        All of Egypt was deemed to belong to the pharaoh as his personal property.

·        At the highest level, the pharaoh maintained a vast household that was also his central administration.

·        Pharaohs took serious responsibility that came with their power.

·        There was a god who made women pregnant and a god that they gave birth.

·        The pharaoh had many wives

·        Most of them were high official’s daughters and foreign rulers that they had family ties with.

·        A women couldn’t hold the full authority of a pharaoh

·        Hatshepsut reigned as king shortly after 1500 B.C.

·        Women as well as men were entitled to benefit from the pharaoh’s rule

·        Daughters inherited property equal to the son’s, and wives could divorce their husbands.

·        Daughters could not inherit government and temple positions.

·        Many Egyptian deities form the Stone Age were originally conceived in the form of animals.

·        The sky god was a god with the head of a falcon.

·        The pharaoh was portrayed as a great sphinx, a human head on a lion’s body.

·        Egyptian priests and rulers often speculated that there lay a single divine power, one god who created all others, one who ruled, protected, and nourished all nations of the world.

·        It was believed that only the pharaoh was immortal, though he could confer everlasting life on his close associates.

·        A time of troubles at the end of the Old Kingdom after 2200 B.C. inspired a creative new idea: local administrators who held power independently of the pharaoh came to expect that they would also live independently of him after death. 

·        By 1800 B.C. Egyptians believed that the soul of every person that died had to stand before Osiris, the ruler of the underworld, for judgment.

·        If a soul passed the judgment, it was passed to everlasting life in a garden of paradise, but if it didn’t it was thrown into the crocodile jaws of a monster.

·        The earliest Egyptian writing is called the hieroglyphs, established in 3100 B.C.

·        They were carvings and paintings intended to honor the pharaohs

·        They were actual pictures or real life or mythical creatures and objects.

·        Soon after the hieroglyphics, shorthand versions of the characters were developed that were easier to write called the hieratic script.

·        It was used by priests and general literary and record keeping purposes.

·        In 700 B.C. an even faster use of writing developed called demotic script.

·        The hieratic and demotic scripts were not chiseled into stone but were done with ink on papyrus- a paper like material made from the stems of a papyrus plant.

·        Most of the Egyptian’s literary writing served religious purposes, like tales of gods and books of rituals and spells to aid the passage of the soul to the afterworld.

·        Surviving texts explain how land surveyors and architects computed the areas and fields, the volumes of various shapes, and the properties of pyramids.

·        Astronomers created a calendar with twelve equal months of thirty days and five free days at the end to make up 365 days of the solar year. 

·        They also understood nothing of germs or infections and believed that their sicknesses were caused by demons entering the body.

·         They also made system procedures for handling illnesses, wrote books about diseases, and established medical libraries and schools.

·        They wanted to created water transportation

·        By 3100 B.C. they made wooden canoes with masts and sails to catch the wind.

·        They used river sailboats by 2500 B.C.

·        They made the best known tombs known as giant royal pyramids. 

·        Pyramids are a massive structure with sloping sides that met at an apex, used as royal tomb in ancient Egypt.

·        The great age of pyramid building was in the early centuries of Egyptian civilization, and the largest of them was built by order on King Khufu who ruled in 2650 B.C.

·        The Great Pyramid measures 476 feet high and 760 feet on each side of its base.  The temple of Amon at Karnak was begun 1503 B.C. and completed 1300 B.C.

·        It is the largest constructed building ever.

·        In 2200 B.C. a series of weak pharaohs allowed local officials to gain independent hereditary power in the regions that they controlled.

·        Egypt remained in turmoil until 2050 B.C. when a dynasty from the up river city of Thebes brought the whole country under its rule to form the Middle Kingdom

·        Internal conflict was renewed about 1800 B.C.

·        Semitic immigrant tribes known as Hyksos were able to move into Lower Egypt and the Middle Kingdom came to an end

·        Native Egyptian pharaohs continued to rule Upper Egypt from Thebes, and in 1600 B.C. they were able to defeat the Hyksos rulers and bring the nation into its imperial era, the New Kingdom.

·        After the New Kingdom, Egypt often became a victim of invaders from Africa, Mesopotamia and Europe.

·        In 525 B.C. Egypt became a province of the empire of Persia

·        From 335 B.C. it was ruled by the Greeks

·        In 30 B.C. it was conquered by the Romans.

·        The last great temples of the Nile were built after 250 B.C. by Greek kings acting as Egyptian pharaohs.