Ancient Egypt (-2900 to -30) lasted from its first king, Namer, to its last queen, Cleopatra. Its glory days were from -2900 to -1069. After that it fell under foreign rule. It is famous for its pyramids, the huge buildings where they buried their pharaohs (god kings) as mummies.
Egypt was, compared to later times, a small and weak country. Its army was no match for the Persians or the Greeks, much less the Romans. All the same, before -1100 few could match Egypt in learning, art, invention or warfare.
Most of Ancient Egypt – its cities and towns – were on or close to the Nile river. Yet the fertile land was not completely farmed – there was still a lot of wilderness left.
Egypt comes in two parts:
- Lower Egypt: the north, the Delta, where the Nile branches out before it reaches the sea.
- Upper Egypt: south Egypt where the Nile follows a single course.
The two chief cities were Memphis in the north where all the great pyramids are, and Thebes in the middle, where its great temples are. For most of its history Egypt was ruled from Thebes.
There were three great periods in Egypt’s ancient history:
- -2686 to -2160: Old Kingdom
- -2055 to -1650: Middle Kingdom
- -1550 to -1069: New Kingdom
Each period lasted about 400 to 500 years, when there was peace and prosperity. In between each was a hundred years of war, when royal families fought one another – or foreigners came to make themselves kings.
The Great Sphinx and most of the famous pyramids were built during the Old Kingdom. The picture that most people have of Egypt, however, comes from the New Kingdom, particularly the time of King Tut (-1300s) and Ramesses II (-1200s).
The most famous book of Ancient Egypt is the “Book of the Dead”, written about -1550, at the beginning of the New Kingdom. Some of the Proverbs of the Bible come from the “Instruction of Amenemope”, written during the later half of the New Kingdom.
Ancient Egyptian writing is known as hieroglyphics. For over a thousand years people had forgotten how to read them, till the early 1800s when Napoleon’s army found the Rosetta Stone in Egypt. It had hieroglyphics translated into Greek.
Hieroglyphics are a kind of picture writing. Some of the pictures tell you what a word means, some tell you how to say it. It is more a system of suggestions for those who already know Egyptian than a faithful record of a spoken language. Most English letters come from an Egyptian hieroglyph.
Since -1069, Egypt has repeatedly fallen under foreign rule:
- c. -780: Nubian,
- -525: Persian,
- -323: Greek (Ptolemaic),
- -30: Roman / Byzantine,
- +642: Arab,
- +1517: Turkish (Ottoman),
- +1882: British,
- c. +1980: American (as a banana republic).
After Cleopatra:
Religion: By +200, Christianity had spread throughout Egypt. In +391 public worship of the old gods was outlawed. By the 600s even their private worship had probably died out. It was not till the 1300s that most people were Muslim.
Language: Starting in the -300s, the top people became Greek-speaking. Most people, though, continued to speak Coptic, a late form of Egyptian. From the 600s to the 1600s, Arabic slowly took the place of Coptic. Now you only hear Coptic in church.
– Abagond, 2006, 2016.
See also:
- Egypt
- Alexandria
- King Tutankhamen
- Ramses II
- Cleopatra
- How black was Ancient Egypt?
- Ancient Egypt and ancient astronauts
- Cheikh Anta Diop
- Book of the Dead
- Egyptian language
- Greek
- Arabic
- banana republic
Abagond 
>Even Cleopatra, the last Egyptian queen, was in fact a Greek woman (though most likely she was also part Egyptian and even part black African by blood and to Americans might look like a light-skinned black woman).
She definitely was not because she descended from the Macedonian General Ptolemy, who after claiming Egypt after Alexanders’s death became Pharao and adopted a the throne line of succession in which the monarch marries his own sister and their child inherits the throne.
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Cleopatra had African ancestry, skeleton suggests
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/africaandindianocean/egypt/4995155/Cleopatra-had-African-ancestry-skeleton-suggests.html
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Abagond, I have just begun a book that might be of interest to you. “The First Ethiopians” by Malvern van Wyck Smith. He is a white South African researcher whose topic is the origin of western racism. I’ve only just begun the book today, but his conclusion seems to be that it originated in Africa…not Europe. I am interested to see how he arrives at this conclusion. Just thought I’d pass the title on. Hope this finds you well…take care.
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Hmm, I can say after reading The First Ethiopians and a brilliant critique by Hilton, that the book’s evidence is flimsy and he does not prove his premise of the origin of anti-black racism in Africa, being passed from Ancient Egypt to the Greeks and Romans and from there on to Western Europe. Malvern wan Wyk Smith racializes the ancient Egyptian word nehesy to mean “black African” and is not a classicist or ancient historian, so he relies on secondary translations and sources for most of his claims. As for the evidence of ancient Egyptian anti-black prejudice, I recall most of it coming from depictions of “wretched Kushites” and other defeated, subjugated “black Africans” from what is now Nubia/Sudan and ancient Egyptian imperialist rhetoric. To me, that does not conclusively proof any anti-black racist attitudes because ancient Egyptian art during the Middle and New Kingdom included derogatory references to Asiatics and Libyans as well as depictions of defeated peoples in the Near East with less than flattering descriptions, etc.
Moreover, some of his claims (such as a “Khoisanoid” presence from southern Africa to Ethiopia and perhaps predynastic Egypt) are either very unlikely or ludicrous. Hilton’s review focuses on his claims for the Classical/Greco-Roman world, and here we see that van Wyk Smith’s premise is again untenable. Although there may be some evidence of “proto-racist” thought and writing from ancient Rome, there is no evidence for a precedent of “worthy” and “savage” Ethiopias in ancient Greco-Roman thought. He also claims that the Kushites and their Meroitic successors perpetuated this false dichotomy of black-skinned peoples, which, again, he does not prove with any significant sources from the period.
I think St. Clair Drake’s Black Folk Here and There (two volumes, each worth reading) does a better job documenting the presence of “Blacks” in Ancient Egypt and beyond while also covering the emergence of anti-black racism after the advent of Christianity, etc (evidence from patristic literature as well as rabinnical sources reveal some disturbing anti-Black views that equate black skin with sinfulness, lust, immorality, depravity, and the list goes on, although some of these negative qualities were present in some Greco-Roman writings. Anyway, I suggest Black Folk Here and There, The Curse of Ham by David Goldenberg, Lloyd Thompson’s Romans and Blacks, and Gay Byron’s Symbolic Blackness and Ethnic Difference for race, color symbolism, and evidence of racial thought and attitudes. What’s interesting with Byron’s and other work on Christianity in Late Antiquity is, as one can see in the Greco-Roman period, many sources associate Egyptians with black “Ethiopians” (Ethiopia in the Classical sense referred to dark-skinned people, not the modern nation), some Jewish and Christian writers depicting Egyptians as black or linking them with demons, sin, lasciviousness, and other negative associations that were also applied to “Ethiopians.”
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Recent evidence suggests that the Egyptian civilization wasn’t born in Egypt but in the south, around 200 years before the egyptian civilization before it moved north even the egyptian script wasn’t created in Egypt but in this civilization and developed in Egypt.
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Ancient Egypt’s ancestral roots lie in the Horn of Africa. I’ve heard some noted scholars say in the central or equatorial region of Africa. White racism says outside of Africa in the region of what is now the “Middle East”, which is politically racist in and of itself.
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http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/12/17/1352496/-Ancient-Egyptian-technology-may-be-our-first-line-of-defense-from-hospital-infections?detail=email
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From Article supplied by Herneith:
“No matter where in the world you find yourself, hospitals are filled with bacteria and viruses and potential infections for patients. Constanza Correa and her colleagues believe they have found a simple, and very old, fix that could greatly reduce inpatients’ chances of infection—replacing bedrails with copper.
Copper definitely wipes out microbes. “Bacteria, yeasts and viruses are rapidly killed on metallic copper surfaces, and the term “contact killing” has been coined for this process,” wrote the authors of an article on copper in Applied and Environmental Microbiology.
That knowledge has been around a very long time. The journal article cites an Egyptian medical text, written around 2600-2000 B.C., that cites the use of copper to sterilize chest wounds and drinking water.
Early data from a study done where copper rails were used in 3 separate hospitals’ ICU units are promising.”
Linda says,
Herneith, Thank You so much for this article. This is Very interesting information.
This medical text would have been written during the time of the “Old Kingdom” also known as, Kemet
it is very sad, indeed, that this sort of information has been lost and forgotten by the modern day Egyptians.
They take pride in their achievements made by their African ancestors but instead of honouring the Africans,
they give the credit of their culture to the Arabs/Ottoman and have allowed other foreign invaders to steal and appropriate parts of their history and treasures.
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http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/to-your-health/wp/2014/11/22/creaky-joints-sick-leave-endless-paperwork-ancient-egyptian-health-care-sounds-surprisingly-familiar/
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https://www.academia.edu/6346508/_co-authored_Cultural_convergence_in_the_Neolithic_of_the_Nile_Valley_a_prehistoric_perspective_on_Egypt_s_place_in_Africa._Antiquity_2014_
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http://herneith.d.pr/19WjB
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http://herneith.d.pr/7WHe
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