Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was one of the world's first known and longest living civilizations. Some of its most iconic landmarks, the Pyramids of Giza, are 4,500 years old. Egyptian culture has thrived as part of the Persian Empire, Hellenistic Empire, the Roman Empire, the Ottoman Empire, the British Empire, and present-day Egypt. While Egypt has since changed its dominant religion twice (first to Christianity and then to Islam) and its language once (to Arabic), Ancient Egyptian heritage still plays a major role in the self image of the country, as does the Nile, about which the oldest poems and songs still known to man were written.

Understand
"...when Lord Carnarvon, unable to stand in suspense any longer, inquired anxiously "Can you see anything?" it was all I could do to get out the words "Yes, wonderful things"."

- Howard Carter, on the opening of Tutankhamon's tomb

The banks of the Nile River have been inhabited since time immemorial. Written records started to appear around 3000 BC, with the Early Dynastic Period, and one of the world's first known monarchies. Ancient Egyptian history is usually divided between the Old Kingdom (2686–2181 BC), the Middle Kingdom (2134–1690 BC) and the New Kingdom (1549–1069 BC), each of them surviving five hundred years, still preceding any known civilizations in mainland Europe. To give an idea of the timespans involved: the pyramids were older to Julius Caesar than he is to us, and he was still dealing with an independent Egyptian state claiming — despite its Greek descendant rulers — to be the same state that built the pyramids.

Egypt spent some time gradually developing as a civilization, but was one of the main civilizations in the world by the time the pyramids were built during the Old Kingdom. The peoples of Ancient Mesopotamia had cultural exchange with Egypt, and while Egypt went through periods of ups and downs, it was not until later in its history that Egypt began to build an empire and come in conflict with the Hittites.

According to the Old Testament, the Jewish people lived in the Canaan region for some time and significantly grew in population while they were there. Eventually, according to the Book of Exodus, the Jews were enslaved in Egypt, but this enslavement ended during The Exodus of Moses from Egypt to the Holy Land (Israel), an event dated to around 1300 BC. There is no archaeological evidence for this date or for the Exodus at all, though in modern popular culture it is closely associated with pharaoh Merneptah, the successor of Ramses II, of the 19th Dynasty of the New Kingdom, in whose stela at the Egyptian Museum in Cairo the name "Israel" is first historically mentioned in writing, as an enemy which had been destroyed.

From the 18th to the 20th Dynasties (1549 to 1069 BC, i. e. the New Kingdom), the Egyptian civilization was at its peak. It reached far along the Nile and extended north to the land of the Hittites. However, over the next few hundred years Egypt declined (coincidentally, around the same time that Israel became one of the dominant groups in this area), and from about 500 BC onwards, the Egyptians were under the control of various other empires. Around 30 BC, Egypt became part of the Roman Empire, and did not become a formally independent state until 1922.

Posterity, heritage and rediscovery
Egyptians often invoke the Pharaonic heritage. Through the centuries, a romanticized image of Ancient Egypt survived, especially in Judeo-Christian tradition.

Under the various kingdoms Egypt ruled itself and was an important regional power, but later it was conquered and became part of other nations' empires. Alexander the Great took Egypt from the Persian Empire in the 4th century BCE and one of his generals, Ptolemy, founded a dynasty that ruled as Pharaohs until about 30 BCE when the Roman Empire took over.

Roman (and later Byzantine) Egypt would become one of the centers of early Christianity, particularly Gnostic and other heterodox sects. Egypt still has a Christian minority which uses the Coptic language (the modern descendant of Hieroglyphic Egyptian) liturgically to some extent. Most Egyptians these days are Arabic-speaking Muslims, and the metropolis of Cairo will proudly show the visitors its more than a thousand years as a cultural and literary center of the Arabic-speaking world.

The Napoleonic Wars and the French invasion of Egypt in 1799 started Egyptology, the academic study of ancient Egypt. The science's birth year is associated with the Rosetta Stone's translation by Jean-François Champollion, completed in 1822. Its juxtaposion of a royal decree written in hieroglyph, Demotic script and ancient Greek allowed the hieroglyphs to be deciphered, and spurred new interest in Ancient Egypt. The original is a highlight of the British Museum in London; most Egyptology museums around the world, including Cairo, display a copy.

Read


Doing a bit of homework on hieroglyphs is highly rewarding for history-minded travelers going to Egypt. There are ample resources online; the Wikipedia article is very informative. Actually, for the benefit of academics and purists, Egyptian hieroglyphs were added to the Unicode Standard in October 2009 with the release of version 5.2, which introduced the Egyptian Hieroglyphs block (U+13000–U+1342F) with 1,071 defined characters.

Before Champollion, the main known source about Ancient Egypt was a now-lost book named Aegyptiaca (History of Egypt), written in Greek by Egyptian priest Manetho (Μανέθων; his Egyptian name is lost), associated with the reign of Ptolemy I Soter (323–283 BC) by Roman historian Plutarch (c. 46–120 AD) while Byzantine chronicler George Syncellus (died after 810) links Manetho directly with Ptolemy II Philadelphus (285–246 BC). The multi-volume work was much admired and quoted by later Ancient Greek writers. Therefore, most commonly known names of Egyptian gods, cities and pharaohs, and even basic terms like "pyramid", "sarcophagus", "pylon" and "hypostyle hall" are Greek, often very unrelated to their Ancient Egyptian form. The hieroglyphic system of writing did not write most vowels (similar to Hebrew and Arabic) and, over more than two millennia, the language evolved considerably; by Ptolemaic times, scribes would go very hermetic and creative, with an enormous expansion of the script's graphemic inventory. The pharaohs had five different official names (a bit similar to Chinese and Japanese emperors, but more complicated) and it is unclear how the "real Egyptian name" of any given pharaoh actually sounded - an exception might be the ubiquitous superstar Ramses II, very much written as "Ramsu", the sun (Ra) + the three skins tied together (ms) + the folded cloth (s) + the reed (sw) signs.

To give an example of what those transliterations look like, the word the Egyptians used for their own land is km.t and Egyptologists filled in es to make it pronounceable, hence the term "kemet", which likely means "black land", referring to the fertile black soils as opposed to dšṛt "deshret", the "red land" of the surrounding desert. The original form of the name Osiris is wsir; Isis is ast, Anubis is inpw, Amon is imn. The pharaoh Cheops was actually Khufu, Chephren was Ka-Ef-Ra and Mykerinos was Men-Kau-Ra.

In a touristic context, expect to use mainly the Greek, conventional nomenclature. A basic homework on hieroglyphs will get you to identify royal cartouches and variations of the offering formula on papyri and tomb walls; you'll be glad to have learned them.

Destinations
See the #Stay safe section of the Egypt article for information about safety concerns related to travel in Egypt. Any relevant travel warnings are included at the top of the Egypt article.

Outside Egypt
The Pharaonic civilization left its footprint outside the borders of modern-day Egypt. Particularly during the New Kingdom, Egypt engaged in far-flung diplomacy and imperial conquest throughout the Eastern Mediterranean world of the Late Bronze Age. Egyptian objects were taken outside Egypt through trade throughout the existence of the Pharaonic civilization and antiquities were exported as early as Roman times but plunder and looting, and later actions by European powers and the U.S., took considerable antiquities outside Egypt with or without the approval of Egyptian authorities of the time.

Egyptologists have criticized the fact that the British Museum holds almost as many objects from Egypt as the Egyptian Museum and there are periodic calls to return them. Others point out that having irreplaceable artifacts housed in different sites throughout the world reduces the risk of the entire archeological record of Egypt falling victim to plunder, war or destruction as has befallen many relics of Ancient civilizations.