LO3

LO3 Land of the Pharaohs:

• During the Neolithic Age, the people of the Nile had moved toward civilization in response to the same influences that gave rise to the cities of Sumer, but Egyptian civilization was more stable more stable than that of Mesopotamia
• The Narmer Plette: was used for grinding makeup for divine images in an Upper Egyptian temple about 3100BC
• Map 1.3 Ancient Egyptian: grew up in a thin strip of fertile land where the Nile crosses the North African desert, and in the border region of the river's delta  
• Egypt stretches along the lower reaches of the Nile's four-thousand-mile course from Central Africa to the Mediterranean Sea
• Pharaohs: the rulers of ancient Egypt
• "Hail to thee, O Nile, that issues from the earth and comes to keep Egypt alive! Hidden in his form of appearance, a darkness by day, to whom minstrels have sung. He that waters the meadows which Re created, in order to keep every kid alive. He that makes to drink the desert and the place distant from water: that is his dew coming down from heaven." -Hymn to the Nile
• The Egyptians, like other polytheistic peoples, recognized no hard-and-fast boundary between humans and gods, and in the case of the pharaoh, they took this belief  mush farther than the Mesopotamia's
• As a god, every pharaoh was identified in different ways with three of the country's ruling  deities.
• The women who were closest to the pharaoh, the King's Mother and the King's Principal Wife, also had a touch of divinity, for it was god who made them pregnant and a god to whom they gave birth.
• The Great Sphinx: this famous monument, carved out of solid rock in the royal burial area at Giza, expresses the Egyptian belief in the pharaoh as god-king
• Many Egyptian deities, tracing back to the Stone Age, were originally conceived in the form of animals
• Writing arose in Egypt, as it did in Sumer, along with civilization itself, but the initial impulse was different.
• Hieroglyphs: the earliest Egyptian writing, in which pictures stood for whole words or separate sounds of words
•  Egyptian civilizations, like that of Sumer, both needed scientific and technical knowledge and had specialists who could provide it
• Pyramid: a massive structure with sloping sides that met at an apex, used as a royal tomb in ancient Egypt
• King Menkaure: the queen has her arm protectively around her husband, a typical pose in Egyptian statues  To hold the Egyptian state together for many centuries on end was no easy matter.