Egypt

The Egyptians developed Neolithic agriculture during the Predynastic Period (5500 – 3100 BC). The Egyptian civilization included three great dynasties: Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, and New Kingdom. A drought ended the Old Kingdom between 2200 and 2000 BC. A political upheaval ended the Middle Kingdom in 1600 BC. The New Kingdom formed after the Egyptians defeated the Hyksos (foreigners).

Unlike Mesopotamia, irrigation of crops was not required near the fertile Nile River in Egypt. The Nile in Egypt includes two sections. The upper Nile in the south floods every year in the fall season and farmers impound the water in order to fill their soils with water. Once the floods recede, farmers planted their crops in November. The Lower Nile is the Nile Delta near the Mediterranean Sea. As with the Ubaid, there is no evidence of the class system in Predynastic Egypt. As the Uruk IV period in Mesopotamia (3500 – 3000 BC), cities in Egypt in the Late Predynastic Period began to grow larger, with up to 5,000 people.

Egyptian pottery and art from the Predynastic Period (4400 – 3100 BC) had its own African style (Figure 15‑11), which indicates that the Egyptian culture originated in Africa. The language also indicates and African origin of Egyptian culture. Ancient Egyptian, Semitic (Hebrew and Arabic), and Cushitic (Ethiopia) are in the Afro-Asiatic family (Figure 15-13 and Figure 15‑13) of languages. Although scholars thought that Afroasiatic languages (a.k.a. Hamito-Semitic languages) originated in Mesopotamia, most modern linguists take the opposite view and think that Afroasiatic originated in Ethiopia, moved northward to Egypt, and then flowed east and west to the Middle East and North Africa, respectively (Figure 15‑14). Other scholars think that archaeological evidence supports the spread of Afroasiatic languages from Mesopotamia to Egypt.

The origin of the language name Cushitic is the ancient nation of Kush. The city-state of Kerma was the capital of Kush and was located near the 3^rd cataract of the Nile River in northern Sudan. Cultural artifacts in Kerma begin in 3,000 BC. It began as an urban center built around a large temple. The kingdom of Kush extended from the 1^st to 4^th cataracts on the Nile River between 2450 and 1450 BC. The Kushites (Figure 15‑17) ruled all of Egypt during the 7^th century BC (Figure 15‑16). The Kushites referred to people who were native to the area as “one from the land of Kush.” There was extensive trade, relationships, and conflicts between Kush and Egypt over the 1^st to 3^rd millennia BC.

There have always been two parts of Egypt, Upper (southern cities along the Nile River) and Lower (northern cities in the Nile Delta). The Protodynastic Period (3100 – 3000 BC) saw the move toward political unification between Upper and Lower Egypt. They were united during the Early Dynastic Period (3000 – 2700 BC). This was followed by three “golden eras” in Egypt, the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, each followed by periods of instability with economic decline and political instability (intermediate periods).

The Old Kingdom lasted from 2686 to 2181 BC. King Sneferu (2613 to 2589 BC) perfected the process of pyramid building and his son, Khufu (2689 to 2566 BC), built the Great Pyramid of Giza near Cairo, Egypt, one of the Seven Wonders of the World. The Egyptians kept historical records in the pyramids and other structures so scholars date the reigns of kings to specific years rather than rounding to decades or centuries; however, there is sometimes disagreement concerning the precise lengths of the reigns of some kings. The Great Pyramid (Figure 15‑18) took 20 years to build and was a tomb for Khufu (a.k.a. Cheops) and his queen. The sides of the pyramid are 800 ft (230 m), and the height is 455 ft (139 m). Khufu also built smaller pyramids for his other wives and nobles. Khufu and his descendants are generally depicted by historians as being extremely cruel in their practice of forcing slaves to build pyramids. Other rulers of Egypt generally used a conscription system rather than slaves where people served the state for a few months each year as a form of taxation. Some private individuals did keep slaves.

Descriptions from the Old Kingdom indicate that the number of workers, just for subprojects such as transportation of stones to the pyramid, was enormous; The pyramid included 2.3 million blocks up to 80 tons in weight. The entire pyramid weighs 60 million tons. Many poor people wasted their lives constructing these massive structures in which one rich person was buried in hope of going somewhere in the afterlife. Be that as it may, the construction of massive walls, buildings, and pyramids by early civilizations without the aid of tractors or electric cranes is amazing. They first transported the blocks to the pyramid on boats on the Nile River. One theory is that they constructed a road from the river with a gentle slope to 1/3 of the pyramid height.[1] They constructed an internal ramp inside the walls of the pyramid to move the blocks to the upper levels of the pyramid. A French research group used microgravity imaging to show the probable location of a ramp that corkscrews up the inside of the Giza pyramid. Once the pyramid was 1/3 height, workers began to transfer the blocks used to construct the road to the pyramid. Thus, they removed the ramp by the time that they completed the pyramid.

The drought that ended the Akkadian Empire in 2150 BC was one of the largest droughts in Middle Eastern history and encompassed the entire Middle East, including Egypt.[2] Kaniewski et al described it as follows

“The agricultural plains between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers were subjected to an important shift to aridity at 4170 +/- 150 years BP…. A dramatic drop of the Dead Sea level (45 m) starts at ca. 2250 B.C. Lower precipitation amounts in the southern Levant, brine sediments from the northern Red Sea, 13C and 18O data from Gobekli Tepe and Lake Zeribar (28), all point toward a shift to more arid conditions in western Asia during the time period ca. 2250 to 2050 B.C.” [3]

The drought extended into East Africa in the Nile watershed in Ethiopia and Sudan and stopped the Nile floods between 2200 and 2150 BC (the 4.2 ka event). There was famine in the land, which broke apart the Old Kingdom of Egypt. This was the first period of instability. With the return of rainfall and crops, the government solidified. The Middle Kingdom began in 2050 BC and lasted until 1650 BC. The Middle Kingdom ended with a period of political chaos and the rule of the foreign Hyksos (1650 to 1550 BC) during the second period of instability. The New Kingdom (Figure 15-19) began after the defeat of the Hyksos foreign invaders.

The Egyptians developed writing in 3100 BC, Hieroglyphics, which was written on clay. The subsequent Hieratic writing system was written on papyrus. They created the 24-hour day and the 365-day calendar. They had many excellent mathematicians, particularly during the Middle Kingdom.

References

[1] Brier, Bob, How to build a pyramid, Archaeology, Vol 60, No 3, May/June 2007

[2] Bernhardt, Christopher E., Benjamin P. Horton, and Jean-Daniel Stanley. "Nile Delta vegetation response to Holocene climate variability." Geology 40, no. 7 (2012): 615-618.

[3] Kaniewski, David, Etienne Paulissen, Elise Van Campo, Michel Al-Maqdissi, Joachim Bretschneider, and Karel Van Lerberghe. "Middle East coastal ecosystem response to middle-to-late Holocene abrupt climate changes." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 105, no. 37 (2008): 13941-13946.

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Nile River in Cairo. Credit: Raduasandei. Public domain