In May, I will be travelling to Egypt for the first time. In order to profit from my trip, I’ve been studying the history of Egypt. It is fascinating. As Herodotus said, “I will speak at length about Egypt because there is no other country like it, nor any other that possesses as many wonders.” I recommend Jason Thompson’s A History of Egypt, as an overview of the whole history. It keeps moving and doesn’t get bogged down yet covers every era in a helpful way. Here are 11 fascinating facts from the history of Egypt. These are the things that stuck out to me. I am curious to see if this list will change after I visit Egypt.
1. Djoser, the second king of the 3rd Dynasty, erected the Step Pyramid. It was the first great stone building in the world. “Described by one Egyptologist as a ‘subterranean palace,’ the underground dimension of the Step Pyramid was never equaled in subsequent pyramids” (22). There were many pyramids built subsequently, but it is interesting to note that there were twice as many pyramids were built in Nubia as in Egypt. You can see these today in North Sudan.
2. Hieroglyphs (not hieroglyphics), the writing of the Egyptians, began in the Old Kingdom. They considered it as a gift from the god of wisdom, Thoth. So, they wanted to keep using the same writing throughout their history. Even in ancient times, people were impressed with the appearance of this writing. It continued from the third millennium B.C. until the Byzantine Empire (around the 6th century A.D., when the last temple (Philae, near Aswan) was closed). Eventually, the knowledge of their meaning was lost. It was not rediscovered until they were deciphered in the 19th century after the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.
3. The Old Kingdom (Ancient Egyptian history is commonly divided into Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms) had no slaves. They used the corvée, which was the drafting of individuals in the kingdom for a month of labor, to construct the great pyramids. The reason they could do this was “a widely shared ideology about the nature of society and how it should function” (34). “The pyramids were certainly designed as royal tombs. Doubts that any society would devote so much of its resources to such a purpose are based on misunderstandings of the Old Kingdom and its driving ideology” (36). Continue reading “11 Fascinating Facts from the History of Egypt”