P6 u2 h.1.3. egypt dossier

INEBI 6. UNIT 2 Ancient Civilisations h.1.3.: Egypt Dossier

INDEX:

Introduction

Location

Daily Life

Art Symbolism

Writing & Numeral System

Architecture

Introduction The ancient Egyptians were fascinating people who settled in the Nile

Valley thousands of years ago.

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At first, they survived by hunting animals and gathering fruits to eat. Gradually the communities formed a very developed civilisation and around 5500 BC people started to settle in the river banks and cultivate the land. Every year in July the river inundated the valley during several weeks, the ancient Egyptians learned how to canalise this water to use it during the rest of the year to cultivate the land.They worked the land very hard but saved time to enjoy family and friends, music, parties and hunting.Egyptians believed in life after death and animals were very important in Ancient Egypt and that is the reason why most Egyptians gods had animal heads.

Location As we mentioned above the Egyptian civilisation developed around the

Nile valley.The Nile is one of the biggest rivers in the world and runs along North East Africa from the big lakes in Central Eastern Africa to the Mediterranean Sea.The Nile valley is very long but the Egyptian civilisation was located in the lower part of the river between the Red Sea and the Sahara desert.

This a more detailed view of Egypt at that time:


Satellite view of the Lower Nile valley

Red Sea

Sahara Desert

River Nile

River Nile Valley

Lakes region

Upper Nile

Lower Nile


And three even more detailed views of the same region:


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Daily LifeHouses

Egyptian houses were made of mud bricks; everybody- rich and poor lived in mud brick houses. The difference lay in how big they were and in the decoration.Because the river valley is so narrow, the desert starts in few kilometres, and there was no much space for building the houses were tall, sometimes up to 4 floors high.The streets were narrow, crowded, noisy and filthy. The waste from each house was stored in pits on the ground or simply thrown into the streets.A typical town house had a front room which opened to the street and where the work was done, then a second room used as a living room and further on a third room used as bed room, with wooden beds and straw mattresses. At the back there was a courtyard where the cooking was done.

Family Life

Egyptian society was based on family life, people lived in families. Women run the family and had children while men cultivated the land. Compared with other ancient civilisations, women in Egypt had quite a lot of freedom and many of the same rights as men.


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If a marriage was not a happy one, they could get divorced very easily and children stayed with the mother and both parents were free to marry again.Sons and daughters were valued the same and had free time to play with balls, toy dogs and other games.

Education was based on money, because to go to school families have to pay.So, only the rich and only boys went to school.There were several types of schools: temple schools, village schools and more…Boys started at the age of 5 and learned hieroglyphic script. After learning this they also studied maths, history, literature geography, languages, religion astronomy, medicine, engineering, architecture…Feasting and fun

The Egyptians loved having fun. We know that because in their tombs we have found lots of paintings of party scenes

Rich Egyptians offered big parties for their friends. In these parties enormous amounts of food, such as meat of all types (birds, goats, cows, pigs) vegetables, brads and fruit were served, not to mention wine and beer.


Boys attending school


They ate and drank too much and enjoyed themselves with music and dancing. Musicians played harps, lyres and flutes and dancers and acrobats performed. Poor Egyptians relaxed at home with their families, telling stories and playing games, after a day of hard work and after a dinner of bread, fish from the Nile and beer.Egyptians also loved hunting animals such as crocodiles and hippos but hunting for birds was the most elegant sport. Noblemen went hunting accompanied by their servants and threw sticks at the birds to break their necks.

Clothes

They also liked fashion ad wore wigs in parties and ceremonies. Noble men clean shaved their heads.No Egyptian costume was complete without a selection of gold amulets, bracelets and other ornaments.Poor people also wore them but made of copper or wood.Most clothes were made of linen; rich people wore fine linen and ordinary people thicker linen made by themselves.Egyptians used no shoes, sometimes wore sandals made of leather but most of the time went barefoot.

Medicine and magic

Egyptian doctors were very much respected and usually passed their knowledge from father to son. Once they have finished training and were recognized as doctors they received a government salary.Most doctors worked as GPs in the community but there were doctors in temples and in the pharaoh’s palace as well.Egyptian doctors understood quite a lot about the body. They knew that the heart pumps blood to the body and knew the nervous system. They mended bones but they believed strange things such as air, water and nerves passed through the heart as well and that we humans thought with the heart and that the brain was useless.They prepared drugs to cure diseases and also recommended rest and above all hygiene.To the Egyptians illnesses were caused by evil spirits entering the body, so prayers to the Gods were important to cure people, That’s why there were doctors in temples as well.

Art Symbolism

Animals were very important in ancient Egypt. Unlike other cultures whose gods were more like people, most ancient gods had animal heads and a lot of artwork represented them.



Cats especially were held in high esteem. They believed that cats had magic powers to protect their homes and children from danger: That is the reason why we find so many artistic representations of cats.As we said at the beginning of this dossier Egyptians also believed in the afterlife. They firmly believed that in the afterlife people enjoyed the same activities as in real life. They prepared for the afterlife by filling their tombs with small and large statues of pets, friends and family and with other things that they may need to keep them company or to help them have a good time in their afterlife.There is a scene of the Book of the Dead, which shows the journey to the afterlife. The dead person is in the Hall of Judgement. Osiris, god of the underworld and of rebirth presides the scene sitting in his throne and wearing a tall crown and looks like a mummy.Anubis, the jackal god of mummification is there too, balancing the result of the dead person’s life. Behind the dead stands Isis, wife and sister of Osiris.The statue of Anubis was part of a tomb. He is raising his hand performing purification rites over a mummy. During the funeral these rites were performed by priests wearing jackal masks to impersonate Anubis. The figure is shown in a typical Egyptian pose. He wears the feather costume of the gods and stands on a base decorated with designs that symbolise tombs and palaces.Coffins were also pieces of art that showed the status of the dead person. The richer the decoration the more powerful an aristocrat was.They used to decorate the coffins with symbols of rebirth, gods and goddesses and protective animals such as cats and scarab beetles were also common.

Writing and Numeral System

The ancient Egyptian language is one of the oldest languages of the world.It was spoken from about 4,000 years ago until the 11 th century AD when Arabic replaced it.This ancient language was written down in two ways: Hieroglyphic script and a simplified version called hieratic script.

The decipherment of hieroglyphs was made possible by the discovery of the Rosetta Stone.The Rosetta Stone was found in 1799 by Napoleonic troops in Egypt. The stone is written in three languages: At the top in hieroglyphs, in the middle the same text in demotic script and at the bottom in Greek.

Because the text was identicalin both languages they could

understand the hieroglyphs.


Hieroglyphs

http://weblifac.ens-cachan.fr/Portraits/S.ROSMORDUC/nomhiero.html


The Egyptians believed that writing had been given to them by the god Thoth and thought that the signs had magic power and could come to life.The hieroglyphic script was a very complex system of more than 700 pictures.Many of the pictures stood for the actual object but as well as an object they could represent a sound too.Hieroglyphs only represented consonants, but as you can see in the picture below some vowels have been added.After the end of the Egyptian culture Christianity took over as the main religion and Egyptian language began to change and was called Coptic. Nowadays Christians in Egypt are called Copts and in church they still use a form of Coptic that it is the closest relative to ancient Egyptian in the world.


Egyptian demotic script

Greek


Egyptians also wrote numbers. They had a good knowledge of Mathematics.The Ahmes Papyrus was found in 1858 in a ruin in Thebes and later sold to the British Museum. It was deciphered using the Rosetta Stone. It is one of the earliest written mathematical documents that has been found. It was recorded around 1650 B.C., although the information contained in the document dates back to the construction of the pyramids by the great architect Imhotep, around 3,000 B.C. The Ahmes Papyrus, here below, contains a set of 84 mathematical problems and their solutions. In this papyrus we can see that they knew the complicated mathematical concept of .

They represented numbers using numerals such as the ones below.

Architecture



The ancient Egyptians excelled in architecture and their monuments are the best evidence. The scale and grandeur of the ancient Egyptian temples and pyramids was a reflection of both the gods and the pharaohs.Building them took thousands of men and incredible skill, using only very basic equipment.The pyramids were funerary monuments and the first to be built was that of Zoser, yet the Pyramids of Giza are the most famous and one of the wonders of the world. They were built in the era of the 4th Dynasty and were used as tombs for the Pharaohs.The pyramids were built without machines. The men who built them were not slaves, but farmers who worked for the king during the inundation of the Nile and were paid for their work with food, oil and cloth.To build a pyramid such as one of these, they needed more than 2 million blocks of stone. The stones were transported in wooden planks from near by quarries.

Each block weighed more than 2 tons and was put into place using ramps in the sides of the pyramid.Pyramids as you already know were pharaoh’s tombs and despite their size, they only contained a few corridors leading to the burial chamber.

Temples were also constructed and some of them were huge.The pharaoh himself used to attend the beginning of building with a ceremony and put the first layer of stones.The temples were decorated with columns designed to look like palm trees carved with lotus flowers and papyrus leaves. No temple was finished without sculptures often very big like the ones in the Abu Simbel temple that was built in the rocks.

The Great Sphinx of Giza

The Sphinx of Giza is a symbol that has represented the essence of Egypt for thousands of years. It was carved from the rock of the Giza plateau; the Sphinx is truly a mysterious marvel from the days of ancient


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Egypt. The body of a lion with the head of a king or god, the sphinx has come to symbolize strength and wisdom.

The most popular and current theory of the building of the Sphinx says that it was commissioned by the 4th Dynasty King, Khafre (2558-2532 BCE). Khafre was one of the sons of Keops. The Sphinx lines up with the Pyramid of Khafre. As one rounds the northeast corner to the front of the Sphinx, the alignment of the two structures becomes more apparent.Although the head of the Sphinx is badly broken in some places, traces of the original paint can still be seen near one ear. Originally it is believed that the

Sphinx was painted and was quite colourful.
