Egypt

Egypt left rich records, and others wrote about it too: the Greek writer Herodotus visited and wrote about Egypt as early as the 5th century BCE.

Egyptians wrote on papyrus, an early kind of paper. To make it, they cut the inner stem of the papyrus plant into strips, laid them criss-cross, then pressed, dried and polished them into sheets. The Papyrus Ebers lists more than 700 cures and spells of Egyptian medicine.

Libraries from about 2000 BCE kept papyrus scrolls in labelled jars on shelves. One jar held the oldest version of 'Sindbad the Sailor'. There were also animal fables (like Aesop's), ghost stories, miracles, romances, and the oldest known 'Cinderella'.

"How did we learn to read hieroglyphs?" In 1799, a French army engineer, Pierre Bouchard, found a big black stone while repairing a fort: the Rosetta Stone. It had the same text in three scripts, including Greek. People could still read Greek, so it worked like a dictionary for the lost script. In 1822, Jean-François Champollion finally deciphered hieroglyphs.

The calendar. Three seasons of four months each: inundation (flood), peret (growing) and shemu (harvest). It was timed by the rising of the star Sirius. The year had 365 days: 12 months × 30 days + 5 extra days. Quite accurate! But the real year is about a quarter-day longer, so it slowly slipped.

The gift of the Nile. City-states appeared around 3000 BCE. Every summer, the Nile flooded and left behind rich black mud, excellent for crops. Egyptians called their land Kemet, 'the black', after this soil.

About 5,000 years ago, farmers learnt to dig ditches to lead Nile water to their fields and reservoirs to store it. Counting the days between floods gave them their calendar. Digging ditches and dams needed many people working together, which probably led to the first local government and a class of officials to run things.

Watch out on the map: the Nile flows from the south to the north, into the Mediterranean. So the north (downstream, where the river meets the sea) is Lower Egypt, and the south (upstream) is Upper Egypt. Upper and lower follow the river, not the map.

Pharaohs and pyramids. The rulers were called Pharaohs. At first a Pharaoh was buried deep underground with a flat, rectangular structure called a mastaba on top. Later, mastabas were stacked one on another, smaller each time, into a pyramid, like the Step Pyramid at Saqqara.

"Why go to all that trouble?" Egyptians believed each person had a ka, a spirit-double, that lived on after death if the body was preserved. So they mummified bodies: they took out the organs (except the heart), dried the body with a salt called natron, oiled it, wrapped it in linen, and buried it with rituals. The Papyrus of Ani shows a heart weighed against a feather.

Society was a pyramid too (Fig. 4.32): the Pharaoh at the top; then officials, nobles and priests; then free landholders, artisans and merchants; and at the bottom serfs and slaves.

Daily life. Egyptians swam, canoed, played board games, and enjoyed music and dancing. At festivals, a god's statue was paraded to music from the sistrum (a rattle). The Sed festival marked a king's 30th year on the throne.

Women in Egypt generally had more rights than in Greece or Rome: they could own property and run businesses. Cleopatra (69–30 BCE) was trained from childhood to rule and became queen at eighteen.