Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was a civilization in northeastern Africa that dates from the 4th millennium BCE.¹ Ancient Egypt was, in effect, an oasis in the desert of northeastern Africa, dependent on the annual inundation of the Nile to support its agricultural population.¹ Nothing moved without the river: the Nile was the country's sole transportation artery.¹ The First Cataract at Aswan, where a belt of granite turned the riverbed into rapids, was the only well-defined boundary within a populated area.¹

Massive stone building, the Egyptians' most striking technical achievement, exploited a centralized state's power to mobilize the huge labour force made available by efficient agriculture.¹ The civilization arose in the fourth millennium BC and only waned in the first four centuries AD, after Egypt was annexed into the Roman empire, which makes it one of the world's most enduring civilizations.²

The arc begins in prehistory: the Nile Valley was first inhabited in the Lower Paleolithic Period, and Neolithic people created stone tools and exploited domesticated plants and animals between 7000 and 4500 BC.³ At the site of Merimde Beni Salama in the Delta, a representation of a human face is the earliest known example of sculpture from ancient Egypt.³ The Badarian cemeteries reveal a formal burial programme: constructing a tomb, positioning the body and supplying the deceased with equipment for an afterlife.³ Around 3300 to 3100 BC, the scenes on large ceremonial slate palettes indicate that one individual held significant power, and the palettes and ivory labels display the first stages of hieroglyphic writing.³ Hierakonpolis in the south, the largest Predynastic settlement known, was the centre of political control.³

Tradition then hands the story to a single name: Menes, the legendary first king, is credited with joining Upper and Lower Egypt in a centralized monarchy, founding the first dynasty and establishing the capital at Memphis.¹ In the Early Dynastic Period, about 3100 to 2686 BC, Egypt became a unified kingdom with a highly centralised administration, built on the invention of hieroglyphic writing.² Memphis stood in the centre of the floodplain on the western side of the Nile, and its position at the Delta entrance made it the natural capital for any ruler of both Upper and Lower Egypt.⁴ Traditionally believed to have been founded in 3000 BC as the capital of a politically unified Egypt, Memphis served as the effective administrative capital during the Old Kingdom and beyond.⁴

The necropolis of Memphis documents the first complex monumental stone buildings in Egyptian history and the development of the royal tomb from the early mastaba shape to the pyramid.⁴ The limestone step pyramid of Djoser is the oldest pyramid ever built.⁴ The Great Pyramid of Giza is the largest of the three pyramids of Giza, built by Khufu (Cheops), the second king of Egypt's 4th dynasty, and completed in the early 25th century BCE.⁵ It originally stood about 482 feet (147 metres) tall, and erosion and the removal of most of the polished limestone casing stones have lowered it to 449 feet (137 metres).⁵ Approximately 2.3 million blocks were cut, transported and assembled into the 5.75-million-ton structure, a masterpiece of technical skill and engineering ability.⁵ How the blocks went up remains an engineering debate: the most plausible theory is that the Egyptians used a sloping and encircling embankment of brick, earth and sand, raised as the pyramid rose, and hauled the blocks up with sledges, rollers and levers.⁵ The ancient numbers are reported as tradition rather than settled fact: according to Herodotus, the Great Pyramid took 20 years to construct and required the labour of 100,000 men, while by the late 20th century archaeologists found evidence of a more limited workforce and suggested that as few as 20,000 workers would have been adequate for the task.⁵ The ancient Greek historian Herodotus reports a hundred thousand men working in three-month shifts.⁶ Writing in the 19th century, Maspero noted that the pyramids were supposed to face the four cardinal points, but that most are not oriented exactly and many vary distinctly from true north.⁷ Maspero gave the Great Pyramid as 481 feet high and 755 feet wide, reduced by the injuries of time to 454 and 750.⁷

The long view belongs to the necropolis: more than thirty-eight pyramids lie within the Memphis property, among them the three pyramids of Giza and the Great Sphinx.⁴ The Great Pyramid is the only surviving wonder of the ancient world, and scientists continue to research how it was constructed.⁴ The pyramids of Giza are often collectively considered one of the Seven Wonders of the World, and they are the last still standing.⁵ Beyond the pyramids, the necropolis holds more than nine thousand rock-cut tombs, from the First to the Thirtieth Dynasty and extending to the Graeco-Roman Period.⁴ Over the 500 years of the Old Kingdom, the Egyptians mastered the art of building in stone and established artistic canons that would last for more than 3,000 years.³

Dates in that table follow the convention used throughout this article: BC or BCE for dates before the common era and CE for dates after it.² Every figure is approximate, and the reference works disagree by decades: the British Museum dates the Early Dynastic Period to about 3100–2686 BC, the Old Kingdom to about 2686–2181 BC and the Middle Kingdom to about 2025–1795 BC.² The Met gives the Old Kingdom as about 2649–2150 BC and the Middle Kingdom as about 2030–1640 BC.⁸ The Middle Kingdom is where the two chronologies openly conflict.²

Ancient Thebes was the city of the god Amun and the capital of Egypt during the Middle and New Kingdoms, lying about 700 km south of Cairo on the banks of the Nile.⁹ Its temple estate at Karnak contains the Hypostyle Hall begun by Seti I and completed by Ramses II, covering 5,000 square metres and supported by 134 columns, those of the central nave standing 20.4 metres high.⁹ With the temples and palaces of Karnak and Luxor, Thebes testifies to Egyptian civilization at its height, when the city ruled an empire from the Euphrates to northern Sudan.⁹ Far to the south, the final bastion of ancient Egyptian religion was Philae, where the rites of the cult of Isis persisted until the 9th century CE.¹¹

The beliefs behind these buildings survive in a literature of the dead: the Book of the Dead is the title now commonly given to the great collection of funerary texts composed for the benefit of the dead.¹² They consist of spells and incantations, hymns and litanies, magical formulae and names, words of power and prayers, cut or painted on the walls of pyramids and tombs and on coffins, sarcophagi and papyri.¹² The oldest religious texts suggest that the Egyptians always associated the Last Judgment with the weighing of the heart in a pair of scales, and the heart, called ab, was the symbol of the emotions and passions out of which proceeded the issues of life.¹² Mummification served the same beliefs: Herodotus describes how embalmers offered three ways of embalming at three prices, showing relatives wooden models of corpses.⁶ In the costliest method the brain was drawn out through the nostrils with a crooked iron tool, the body was cleansed with palm-wine and spices, and the corpse was kept covered in natron for seventy days.⁶ The art served the belief: the monuments of the Egyptian sculpture gallery were created for eternity, meant as vehicles for the spirits of deities, kings and privileged officials.²

The New Kingdom was forged in war: in the Second Intermediate Period the Hyksos, descendants of settlers from western Asia in the eastern Delta, controlled the north of Egypt and allied with the rulers of Kerma in Nubia against the Theban dynasty.⁸ The Theban king Ahmose I reunited Egypt around 1550 BC and founded Dynasty 18, and Egypt went on to control Nubia as far south as the fourth cataract.⁸ Through military campaigns, trade, diplomatic gifts and tribute, Egypt attained a level of wealth previously unknown — a catalyst for the third great flowering of Egyptian culture, with building campaigns unequalled since the pyramids.⁸ Hatshepsut, the most powerful female ruler of pharaonic history, built her unique funerary temple in western Thebes.⁸ At Deir el-Bahari the temple stands with immense porticoes, terraces flanking the mountain, and frescoes tracing her journey to the country of Punt.⁹

Near the end of the 18th dynasty Akhenaten broke with tradition by establishing the first monotheistic religion, and although it ended with his death, the artistic innovations of his reign continued into the next dynasty.⁸ His young successor Tutankhamun changed his name and issued a decree restoring the temples, images, personnel and privileges of the old gods.¹³ Tutankhamun reigned around 1333 to 1324 BCE and is known chiefly for his intact tomb, KV 62, found in the Valley of the Kings in 1922.¹³ At the time of Carter's discovery the tomb was still largely intact and held what he called a strange and wonderful medley of extraordinary and beautiful objects, and Carter spent the next 10 years clearing it.¹³ Inside the small tomb the mummy lay within a nest of three coffins, the innermost of solid gold, and on the king's head was a magnificent golden portrait mask.¹³ Tutankhamun unexpectedly died in his 19th year, and in 2010 scientists found traces of malaria parasites in his mummified remains and suggested malaria combined with degenerative bone disease may have been the cause of death.¹³ Its memory was carried by its later kings: Ramesses II, most famous of the Ramesside kings, reasserted Egyptian hegemony over the Levant and Nubia.⁸ The Ramesside Period is best known for its monumental structures — the temple of Osiris built by Seti I at Abydos, the rock-cut temple of Ramesses II at Abu Simbel and Medinet Habu in western Thebes.⁸ In the British Museum, the largest Egyptian sculpture represents Ramesses II, ruler of rulers, who reigned through most of the 13th century BC.²

Writing was there from the beginning of the state: the Early Dynastic kingdom's centralised administration was built on the invention of hieroglyphic writing.² Its earliest stages are older still: around 3300 to 3100 BC, palettes and small ivory labels display the first stages of hieroglyphic writing.³ Then the script fell silent: after hieroglyphs went out of use at the end of the fourth century AD, the knowledge of how to read and write them disappeared.¹⁴ In the early years of the nineteenth century, some 1400 years later, scholars used the Greek inscription on the stone as the key to decipher them.¹⁴ The stone itself is part of a grey and pink granodiorite stela carrying a priestly decree concerning Ptolemy V in three blocks of text: hieroglyphic with 14 lines, demotic with 32 and Greek with 54.¹⁴ The inscription is a decree passed by a council of priests, one of a series affirming the royal cult of the 13-year-old Ptolemy V on the first anniversary of his coronation.¹⁴ The decree is inscribed on the stone three times: in hieroglyphic for a priestly decree, in demotic for daily purposes, and in Greek, the language of the administration.¹⁴ Soldiers in Napoleon's army discovered the stone in 1799 while digging the foundations of an addition to a fort near el-Rashid, known as Rosetta.¹⁴ It has been exhibited in the British Museum since 1802, with only one break.¹⁴

Two scholars turned the key: Thomas Young first showed that some of the hieroglyphs on the stone wrote the sounds of a royal name, that of Ptolemy, and Jean-François Champollion then realised that hieroglyphs recorded the sound of the Egyptian language, laying the foundations of knowledge of the ancient Egyptian language and culture.¹⁴ The find belongs to a wider beginning: modern Egyptology began with a French scientific expedition accompanying Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798.²

The title pharaoh derives from the Egyptian per ʿaa, meaning great estate, and was used increasingly from about 1400 BCE for the living king.¹ Women had a legal status only marginally inferior to that of men: they could own and dispose of property in their own right, and initiate divorce and other legal proceedings.¹ Above the household stood the power of the state to mobilize a huge labour force made available by efficient agricultural practices — the foundation of the most striking technical achievement of the Egyptians, massive stone building.¹ The burial tradition runs deep: the Badarian cemeteries reveal a formal burial programme with constructed tombs, positioned bodies and equipment supplied for an afterlife.³ The record is uneven: village archaeology preserves far less than tombs and temples, and the everyday life of most Egyptians is the hardest part of the story to recover.¹⁵

In the Late Period the Assyrians invaded Egypt repeatedly between about 671 and 663 BC, and the Achaemenid Persians controlled the country from 525 to 404 BC and again from 343 to 332 BC.¹⁰ Egypt, under Persian rule since 343 BC, was conquered by Alexander the Great in 332 BC, who built a new capital, Alexandria, oriented toward the Mediterranean and the Hellenistic world.¹⁰ The Ptolemaic court that followed produced the decree behind the Rosetta Stone, issued by a council of priests in 196 BC.¹⁴ The end of native kingship survives in one object: the sarcophagus of Nectanebo II, Egypt's last true pharaoh, whose reign was cut short by a Persian invasion and whose fate remains unknown.² The final act belongs to Rome: in 31 BC Octavian conquered Antony and Cleopatra in a sea battle off Actium, and in 30 BC he took control of Egypt after their suicides and the death of Caesarion.¹⁰

The past is kept in place as well as in museums: the UNESCO property at Thebes covers the temples of Karnak and Luxor on the east bank and a large archaeological area on the west bank, 7,390 ha with a buffer zone of 444 ha.⁹ The Nubian Monuments are a serial property of ten component parts covering 374.48 ha, from Abu Simbel and Amada to Philae, the Elephantine ruins and the Aswan stone quarries.¹¹ The first five component parts contain temples moved during the UNESCO International Campaign from 1960 to 1980 to save them from flooding by the Nile and Lake Nasser.¹¹ Among them is the Great Temple at Abu Simbel, carved out of an escarpment of solid rock, whose design allows the rays of the sun to penetrate to the innermost chamber twice annually on the equinoxes.¹¹ The stone quarries at Aswan, with an unfinished obelisk left behind, are the basis of knowledge of ancient Egyptian quarrying technology.¹¹

The dates in this article are a modern reconstruction, assembled from king lists, inscriptions and datable objects rather than from a single ancient chronicle.²

The story of Egypt has been told by many voices, and these are four of them: Herodotus on the men who built the pyramids, Maspero on their orientation, Petrie on the sphinx he offered a museum, and Budge on the judgment of the dead.⁶