Discovering Ancient Egypt
In the early Stone Age, people in Egypt lived high up on the land above the Nile. By about 5000BC, they become farmers, growing wheat and barley and raising cattle. The farmers prospered and started to form kingdoms. Recent excavation shows that by 3500BC people were already living in cities and started to invent systems of writing.
The River Nile
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Pharaohs
From 3100BC, Egypt was ruled by powerful kinds known as pharaohs. The title comes from the words per-aa meaning “great house”, which refers to the king’s palace. The pharaoh was believed to be a living god. Rarely did women rule Egypt in their own rights. On the pharaoh’s death the throne passed to his son, who would be specially trained in sport and warfare to prepare him for the role. |
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Blessed by the Gods
Egyptians worshipped hundreds of gods and goddesses. Many of these were represented by animals such as Anubis, the god of embalming who was represented as a jackal or Thoth, who was responsible for medicine, mathematics and writing, who was represented as an ibis. The sun god Amun-Re was the king of the gods and protector of the pharaoh. Osiris was the god of the underworld and held crook and flail sceptres, as the pharaoh done, to show that he was the king of the underworld. |
Social Life
Alike many other civilisations, Ancient Egyptian people were grouped in a hierarchical order with the Pharaoh (believed to be a god in human form) sitting at the top, with slaves and peasants at the bottom. The social groups that sat closest to the top of the pyramid were more wealthier and powerful than those who sat closest to the bottom, who were often prisoners of war. In the image below you will see the Pharaoh on top (1), vizier and other high-ranking Egyptians such as priest and priestesses and army officials (2), government officials, scribes, architects, engineers, doctors, soldiers and other members of priesthood (3), craft-workers, artists, dancers, musicians and professional mourners (4) and finally, the largest group, peasants and farmers (5). However, social mobility was not impossible, as a small number of farmers and peasants worked their way up the economical ladder.
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Mummies
Anubis, God of embalming finishing up the final touches of the mummification process.
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The Egyptians believed in an afterlife where they would be reborn in their original bodies. For this to happen, the body had to be preserved by mummifying it. The inner organs were removed, dried and stored in vessels, however, the heart was left behind so that it could be weighed in the afterlife. Natron salt was used to dry the body, which was then wrapped in linen bandages. The process of mummification was intended to make the body last forever and to provide the deceased person’s spirit with a home in the afterlife. Egyptians not only mummified humans, but also animals, from birds to cats to crocodiles. This was for a number of reasons - either they were the household pet of a deceased person and meant to keep them company in the afterlife, a food offering for the deceased or as sacred offerings to the gods whom often took the shape of animal forms. This was not uncommon, as researchers have discovered that more than 70 million animal mummies were produced between 800AD and 400AD.
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Afterlife
Ancient Egyptians believed that below the earth was an underworld called “Duat” – a place full of great dangers such as poisonous snakes and lakes filled with fire. To protect themselves against these perils in the afterlife, spells were written on coffins or papyrus scrolls that enabled a safe passage through Duat unharmed. The ultimate danger, however, was to fail the test set in the “Hall of Two Truths”, where your heart was weighed against your past deeds. If you passed the test, you could go through to a land that was just like Egypt itself.
Drawings depicting the weighing of the heart against the "feather of truth". The deceased person is being led by Anubis, God of embalming. ***
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Pyramids
Ancient Egyptians believed that below the earth was an underworld called “Duat” – a place full of great dangers such as poisonous snakes and lakes filled with fire. To protect themselves against these perils in the afterlife, spells were written on coffins or papyrus scrolls that enabled a safe passage through Duat unharmed. The ultimate danger, however, was to fail the test set in the “Hall of Two Truths”, where your heart was weighed against your past deeds. If you passed the test, you could go through to a land that was just like Egypt itself.
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Great Pyramids of Giza
Hieroglyphics
Example of hieroglyphs carved into a wall
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Reading and writing was very important skills in Ancient Egypt. Official record keepers known as scribes held high positions in Egyptian society. Training was thorough - boys training for five years from the age of nine. They learned to carve hieroglyphics (picture symbols) into stone and write on sheets of papyrus. There are more than 700 different symbols in hieroglyphic writing. They were used on tombs, monuments, and in religious texts. There were two kinds of hieroglyphs: the hieratic scripts which was used for everyday purposes and the demotic script which was used to write legal and religious documents. Near the end of the Egyptian civilization, scribes had to be able to write Greek, as they began to have a huge influence over Egypt.
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Hieroglyphics | |
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The Rosetta Stone
The Rosetta Stone
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In 1799, the Rosetta stone was discovered by french soldiers at Rosetta in the western Delta. Until the discovery of this stone, the ability to read hieroglyphs was lost. The stone had one text written in three scripts - hieroglyphic on the top, demotic in the middle and Greek on the bottom. After many years of study, French scholar Jean-Francois Champollion finally deciphered it in 1822 by reading the Greek script to decode the Egyptian texts.
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Jean-Francois Champollion
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