Ancient Egypt was one of the world’s great early civilizations, a nation and culture that dominated northern Africa for nearly 3,000 years and saw hundreds of kings rule over some 30 dynasties. Factors like climate and geography, together with innovative leadership and bureaucratic organization, made possible a legacy that continues to fascinate scholars and amateurs alike: the pyramids, with their staggering scale and mathematical ingenuity; mummies and tombs that provide modern researchers with an enormous body of material to examine; and innumerable carvings of pictures and writing, made decipherable by the Rosetta Stone. The unusually high status of women, the worship of gods of sun and nature, and a fixation on the afterlife are some of the themes that make ancient Egypt alluring to modern students.
As the Ganges was to India and the Yangtze to China, the Nile River was the mother of Egyptian civilization, spurring the rise of agriculture, trade, and one of the most successful societies in the ancient world. Flowing northward out of Burundi into Lake Victoria then through Uganda and Sudan on its way to the Mediterranean Sea, the Nile is the longest river in the world, traversing more than 4,000 miles of the African continent.
Although the Nile flooded wildly during the postglacial period, by 6000 B.C. it was stable enough to support permanent settlements of migrants from the Near East or elsewhere in Africa. By about 4000 B.C., the descendants of those prehistoric settlers had built a network of farming villages along the 660-mile-long Nile River Valley. Over the next thousand years, the Nile River tribes consolidated into small kingdoms, and then into two large groups—one occupying the lower delta and another in the upper valley. The Nile River peoples traded throughout the Near East and especially borrowed many agricultural and cultural ideas from the thriving Sumerian society across the Red Sea. However, while Sumer was organized into 12 autonomous city-states, the Nile groups finally united under one leader, known to legend as Menes, who founded his capital at Memphis around 3100 B.C. and
began the first dynasty of the Old Kingdom (ca. 3100–2200 B.C.). From then until the Roman conquest more than 3,000 years later, a total of 30 dynasties, each with a succession of kings known as pharaohs, ruled ancient Egypt. Unlike Sumerian kings who ruled on behalf of the gods, the Egyptian pharaoh was regarded as a divine being in his own right, and much wealth and time was spent building an appropriate tomb to help him reenter the land of the gods after his death. The pharaoh employed an array of officials to organize all aspects of society, and the tightly ordered Egyptian state promoted the implementation of technological and artistic advances throughout the Nile villages. Egyptian farmers perfected many tools originally invented in Asia; these improved production techniques made Egypt the wealthiest state in the ancient Middle East, and the forbidding desert to the south ensured relative freedom from invasion. With these advantages, the population of the region rose from about 1 million in 3000 B.C. to about 3 million by 1000 B.C.
As the temporal and religious leader, the pharaoh theoretically owned all the land in ancient Egypt, although private citizens were able to buy and sell some property. Farmers were obligated to pay a portion of their output to high-ranking officials. Old Kingdom inhabitants grew crops such as wheat and barley—used for both bread and beer—and probably domesticated cattle and donkeys. They kept cats, dogs, and monkeys as pets, and raised sheep, goats, pigs, and fowl for meat. Hunting, however, was a pastime for the elite, and the hunting of lions and wild cattle was reserved for royalty alone. True slavery was uncommon, although slaves were often conscripted as construction workers for tombs or other state buildings.
The oral language of ancient Egypt shared similarities with the Semitic languages of the Near East—Hebrew, Arabic, and the Hamitic languages of Africa. But Egyptians were among the first to develop a comprehensive written language, as they began using their system of hieroglyphic symbols about 3000 B.C., soon after the Sumerians invented cuneiform writing. Hieroglyphics evolved from pictures used on tomb paintings and were used to tell stories about the deceased, but they also allowed a permanent record of laws, rituals, and business transactions. Scribes wrote religious and administrative texts on papyrus, a form of paper made from reeds that grew along the Nile.
The prosperity of the Old Kingdom produced a burst of creativity in architecture and the arts. For the Egyptians, this cultural expression served the twin goals of organizing earthly existence and guaranteeing smooth entry into the afterlife. Architects mastered stone-working techniques for massive tombs. Painters and sculptors created realistic portraits and life-sized statues of the dead. Scribes developed the tradition of tomb writing into the art of biography. Others wrote Sebayt (“instructions”) to preserve important teachings, like the Ipuwer papyrus, a poem about natural disasters, including the Great Flood.
Beginning around 2181 B.C., this stable society collapsed as northern and southern leaders clashed when an old pharaoh outlived his heirs, causing a rift over succession. As the fighting dragged on, provincial officials became more powerful, further splintering rule. Meanwhile, low river levels brought widespread famine, and factional fighters destroyed monuments and artwork. These “dark ages” are known as the First Intermediate Period.
However, around 2030 B.C., Nebhepetre Mentuhotep II reunited Egypt and established a new capital at Thebes. During the subsequent Middle Kingdom (ca. 2030–1640 B.C.), a cultural revival restored much of the Old Kingdom architecture and sculpture. Artists created impressive new works, and a court official compiled the Story of Sinuhe—a classic of Egyptian literature that recounts the life of a nobleman in the aftermath of the assassination of Amenemhet I. Despite such attainments, the warlike Hyksos invaded Egypt from Syria-Palestine with fast-moving chariots, which gave them a unique advantage in battle. The Hyksos ruled Egypt during the century-long Second Intermediate Period (ca. 1640–1550 B.C.). They brought a variety of technological advances to Egypt, including new weapons and tools and techniques for metalwork and pottery. The Eighteenth Dynasty drove out the conquerors and, from their capital at Thebes, reestablished royal authority throughout the valley.
Almost immediately after they expelled the Hyksos, the pharaohs of the New Kingdom (1550–1070 B.C.) began to expand northward into Syria. Thutmose I (d. 1495 B.C.) sent an invading army as far as the Euphrates River, but Thutmose II (r. ca. 1495–1490 B.C.) could not sustain his father’s conquests and lost power to his half sister and wife, Hatshepsut (r. ca. 1473–58 B.C.). Upon the death of Thutmose II,
Hatshepsut initially served as a regent to his son, Thutmose III. But as the stronger ruler, and possibly due to Thutmose III’s youth, she eventually assumed the position of pharaoh. Some monuments from the period dedicated by Hatshepsut portray both as rulers. Hatshepsut maintained her control over the throne during the first 20 years of the reign of Thutmose III until her death around 1458 B.C.
Hatshepsut’s reign was primarily peaceful; she expanded trade and developed natural resources, including mining at Sinai. She also supported construction, restoring numerous monuments and adding to the famous mortuary complex at Deir-el-Bahri. In reliefs and statuary, Hatshepsut was often depicted as male, including a false beard, although texts usually indicated her female gender in some way. Hatshepsut was not the only female ruler of ancient Egypt; she was one of several women, including Nefertiti and Cleopatra, who each reigned for brief periods. Less is known about their ascents to power and subsequent reigns, due to limited records.
After Hatshepsut died, Thutmose III became a powerful ruler, sending armies to the east and establishing an Egyptian empire in Palestine and Syria. These colonies were ruled by local princes, while Egyptian bureaucrats and garrison commanders oversaw imperial interests and collected tribute payments. Thutmose III also pushed Egyptian control southward into Sudan and Nubia and built more than 50 new temples throughout the thriving empire. However, Pharaoh Amenhotep IV (r. ca. 1372–1354 B.C.), husband to Queen Nefertiti, instigated radical religious reforms that disrupted these political gains. The pharaoh changed his name to Akhenaton and relinquished all the Egyptian gods except for a sun god named Aton and his incarnation on Earth, the pharaoh. This quasi-monotheistic revolution did not fully succeed, but it absorbed the attention of the monarchy to such an extent that the empire crumbled. Akhenaton’s young son-in-law, Tutankhamen (r. 1361–52 B.C.), returned the country to the older religious traditions and began an arduous recovery period. During his 10-year reign, Tutankhamen (whose almost-intact tomb was discovered in 1922, shedding great light on the culture of the Eighteenth Dynasty) reestablished the rule of law and sponsored new buildings in the capital at Thebes. But by 1200 B.C., a series of invasions by Hittites and others forced the Egyptians to abandon the outposts of their empire and defend the Nile
Valley. Still, the Eighteenth Dynasty may have been the height of culture in ancient Egypt. It was also better recorded than most; a set of tablets called the Tell el Amarna yielded information on the reigns of Amenhotep III and his son, Akhenaton.
Egyptian rule splintered again after the death of Ramses XI and, during the Third Intermediate Period (1065–525 B.C.), the priesthood gained influence over a series of ineffective monarchs. The state, weakened by invasions of Libyans from the western desert and Nubians from the Upper Nile, finally fell victim to conquest by the Assyrians (671 B.C.), who had already absorbed Syria and Palestine, and later the Persians (525 B.C.) under Cambyses II. Cambyses II was succeeded by Darius I, who was held in higher esteem by Egyptians for his attempts to improve temples and codify earlier laws. The centuries under Persian rule were a difficult period, however, as Egypt faced true foreign domination for the first time. In 332 B.C., Alexander the Great invaded Egypt with an army of Greeks and Macedonians. Alexander faced little resistance from Egyptians, who regarded his takeover as their liberation from Persian rule. His general, Ptolemy I, founded the last Egyptian dynasty as an essentially Greek state in which Greek language and culture dominated. After Ptolemy I, there followed a succession of kings also called Ptolemy. When Ptolemy XI sought help from the Roman leader Pompey, the Romans were able to establish a foothold in Egypt. Later, Cleopatra, daughter of Ptolemy XI, tried to retain power for Egypt, calling on the Roman emperor Julius Caesar for help. But the Roman Octavian (the future Emperor Augustus) annexed Egypt for Rome, putting Cleopatra’s son, Ptolemy XIV, to death. Egypt became a Roman province in 30 B.C.
♦The Israelites To Jewish and Christian cultures, Egyptian history is closely intertwined with the story of the Israelites, a Semitic people who trace their origins to the ancient city of Ur in Mesopotamia. The Israelites, united by a covenant between their patriarch, Abraham, and their god, Yahweh, migrated to the Canaan region of Palestine sometime after 1900 B.C. According to the Hebrew Scriptures, Joseph, a son of the Israelite patriarch Jacob, was exiled from Canaan and moved to Egypt, where he became a trusted confidant to the pharaoh. By this account, Joseph’s descendants lived comfortably among the Egyptians until “there came to power in Egypt a new king who knew nothing of Joseph.” The Israelites were then enslaved until Moses, a divinely designated
liberator, petitioned the pharaoh for their freedom. The pharaoh refused and, after a protracted struggle, a “mixed multitude”—possibly including others in bondage—fled the Egyptian kingdom into the desert of Sinai and eventually back to Canaan. While no independent archaeological evidence has been discovered for Moses or the other patriarchs, substantial evidence suggests that the Israelites did enter Egypt sometime around the Hyksos period, lived in the Egyptian delta until about 1280 B.C., and occupied parts of Canaan during the decline of Egyptian power there.
Architecture, writing, religion, and burial rituals are some of the most fascinating areas of ancient Egyptian culture. The tombs of pharaohs are noteworthy not only for their architecture but also for the rich materials and records they have preserved, allowing scholars to learn about particular rulers or dynasties, and, as thousands of mummies have been unearthed, to examine unique Egyptian techniques for burying the dead. Following the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, a tremendous body of hieroglyphics became decipherable. Egyptian religion, although it changed sporadically at the whims of the pharaohs, was centered on a deep attachment to nature, including the sun and the waters of the Nile, the most important resource in the life of a civilization that bordered the Sahara.
♦Architecture The most notable surviving examples of architecture in the Mediterranean world are the tombs and temples of ancient Egypt. Most of these buildings were identified solely with the pharaoh who commissioned them, but the first architect known by name, Imhotep, worked during the height of the Old Kingdom and is credited with designing King Zoser’s tomb complex, built about 2680 B.C. in Saqqara. There is no historical precedent for the tomb’s remarkable six-stepped pyramid, and Imhotep is also believed to have invented building in stone—an accomplishment so important that later Egyptians deified him as the son of the creator god Ptah.
Egypt had an abundance of sandstone, limestone, and granite, which permitted larger and more detailed structures than in nearby civilizations. Under order of the pharaoh, builders commanded huge numbers of laborers and artisans and invented ingenious engineering techniques to manipulate massive stones into precise arrangements.
Egyptian temples and tombs were usually made with thick, tapering walls and round columns supporting flat stone roofs. The most famous examples are the complex of pyramids and the Great Sphinx at Giza. The largest and oldest of this group, the pyramid of Cheops (2589–2566 B.C.), was originally 482 feet high by 760 feet square, and occupied about 13 acres. Also known as the Great Pyramid, it was built for the pharaoh Khufu. According to legend, the pharaoh began building his pyramid as a “house of eternity” immediately upon taking power. It was built on the west bank of the Nile, as most cemeteries were, because the sun set, or died, in the west. Builders, who were usually farmers put to labor during the seasons when their fields were flooded, worked for about 20 years, setting layer after layer and building ramps to reach higher levels as they went. The pyramid was topped with a shining golden block. Later pharaohs were buried in more modest tombs furnished with sculptures and painted reliefs. The tombs of Mentuhotep (built ca. 2050 B.C.) and Hatshepsut (ca. 1458 B.C.) at Deir el-Bahri are considerably smaller than the pyramids at Giza. Lesser citizens constructed even simpler tombs according to their means. By the time of the New Kingdom, temples replaced tombs as Egypt’s dominant architectural achievements. Among the most impressive was the temple complex of Karnak (in the modern city of Luxor) built in stages between about 1525 B.C. and 1350 B.C. The complex at Karnak includes the great hypostyle hall, a spread of 5,000 square meters lined with 134 carved columns ranging from 30 to over 60 feet in height that would later influence the Greeks and Romans.
♦Writing The ancient Egyptians created two main systems of writing: the hieroglyphic, in which pictures were used to represent meanings, and the closely related hieratic, a form of cursive. In the First Dynasty (3110–2884 B.C.) the hieroglyphic system was already well developed and used on monuments and other forms of display. But hieroglyphics were more than simply self-referent pictures. Some symbols represented a specific object or idea, some stood in for a syllable or sound, and others gave clues as to how the preceding symbols should be interpreted—such as an eye to indicate that the previous hieroglyph had something to do with seeing. By the time of the Middle Kingdom, hieroglyphics fell out of use, and the hieratic script became more common, used for private documents and administrative matters. In the late
B.C. centuries, demotic script, a developed form of the hieratic, took precedence over the others.
A major development in the understanding of these forms of writing came with the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, a slab of black granite about three and a half feet long and two and a half feet wide, found in 1799 by a Frenchman near the city of Rosetta, northeast of Alexandria. The stone was inscribed in Egyptian and Greek, using three writing systems: hieroglyphics, demotics, and the Greek alphabet. Within a few decades, scholars had deciphered the ancient Egyptian scripts, making possible the translation of a vast body of hieroglyphic inscriptions.
♦Literature The most important work of early Egyptian literature is the Book of Going Forth by Day (earliest portions ca. 2300–2100 B.C.; also known as the Egyptian Book of the Dead), a collection of incantations and spells (in many different versions) placed in tombs as guides for the dead in their journey to the afterlife. Ancient Egyptian literature is also rich in poetry, including love poems, hymns to the gods, and evocations of daily life, written over a period of many centuries from the late third millennium to the early first millennium B.C. The story of “The Sailor and the Wonder Island,” from the Middle Kingdom (2022–1850 B.C.) has some parallels with the later Greek myth of Atlantis.
♦Religion and Mythology At the start of the Old Kingdom around 3000 B.C., the newly united Egypt, having brought together many local cultures that had lived separately along the Nile River Valley, contained great cultural and religious diversity. This is reflected in the complex and often contradictory myths that survive in written Egyptian sources. Despite internal differences, much of Egyptian religion was concerned with life, death, renewal, and the afterlife. The sun plays a large role in Egyptian mythology, with four major deities representing different aspects of the sun (such as its rising and setting): Atum, Amon, Aton, and Ra.
The two most important Egyptian cosmogonies are identified with two principal cities, Heliopolis and Hermopolis. In the Heliopolitan cosmogony, the primordial waters give birth to Atum (the sun). From his mucus (or semen) comes Shu (air) and Tefnut (moisture). Shu and Tefnut beget Geb (earth) and Nut (sky), who beget two gods, Osiris and Seth, and two goddesses, Isis and Nephthys. These nine deities are the
core pantheon, joined by other gods such as Horus, son of Isis and Osiris. The Hermopolitan cosmogony features four god-goddess pairs: Kuk and Kauket (darkness), Huh and Hauhet (limitlessness), Amon and Amaunet (invisibility), and Nun and Naunet (primordial waters). When the pharaoh Menes (also called Narmer) united Upper and Lower Egypt to found the Old Kingdom (ca. 2575–2130 B.C.), he joined together the two pantheons. In his system, Ptah spoke the eight Hermopolitan gods into existence, and then created the nine Heliopolitan deities.
The role of the pharaoh in religion The pharaoh was generally understood as an earthly representative of the gods. He communicated the will of the gods and administered it according to the concept of maat, or justice. Some pharaohs instituted major changes in religion—such as when Akhenaton decreed that the sun god Aton was the only god, and that he, the pharaoh, was Aton’s earthly son. To enforce this shift to monotheism, Ikhnaton destroyed monuments to Amon, who had been regarded as the most powerful of the gods before, and abolished traditions connected to the old religion. After Akhenaton’s death, an angry priesthood destroyed his mummy and erased many references to him. Egypt returned to its earlier, polytheistic religious traditions. Some scholars argue that Akhenaton’s religious fanaticism hastened the decline of Egypt, as the pharaoh neglected his provinces, weakening the empire that later kings would govern.
Polytheistic Egyptian religion, although it varied over the dynasties and was remarkably flexible in its adjustments to need and circumstance, included gods that oversaw many aspects of nature and life, such as the sky, the waters of the Nile, love and fertility, truth and justice, wisdom, war and vengeance, and of course the afterlife, which was a major focus of Egyptian culture.
♦Funerary Practice Egyptian religion stressed the importance of the afterlife and so, instead of cremating their dead, ancient Egyptians developed a sophisticated embalming process to preserve the body for its journey to the underworld. First, they purified the body by washing it with palm wine and water from the Nile. They then removed essential organs such as the stomach, liver, and intestines, using natron, a mineral salt, to dehydrate them before putting them back into the body. The heart was not removed from the body, as it was needed to navigate
the afterlife. The cadaver was dehydrated and preserved with bitumen, honey, and gum resin, then wrapped in linen. Individual body parts, including fingers and toes, were wrapped separately and layered with amulets that served specific purposes in guiding the body on its path. After the ritual “opening of the mouth,” permitting the mummified body to breathe and eat, the mummy was entombed with food and cherished keepsakes—including pets who were mummified and placed alongside their former masters. Royalty received elaborate tombs, double coffins, and sarcophagi decorated with their likenesses, as well as scenes of their lives and burials. Even simple coffins, though interred in cemeteries rather than tombs, usually bore at least both the name of the deceased and paintings of eyes to help show the deceased the way out.