Ancient Egypt and the Nile

The Great Pyramid rose 146 metres, and for more than 3,800 years no building was taller.

A river in the desert

Outside a narrow coastal strip, Egypt gets almost no rain. Its farmland was a thin green ribbon along the Nile, plus the fan-shaped delta where the river splits before the Mediterranean. Every summer, heavy rain far to the south in the Ethiopian highlands swelled the river, and from about July to September the Nile spread over the valley floor and left a layer of dark silt. Egyptians called their country Kemet, "the black land", after this soil, and the desert the red land. The Greek historian Herodotus repeated an older saying that Egypt was a gift of the river. The yearly flood continued until the Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, held it back.

Two lands become one

Before about 3100 BCE there were two realms: Upper Egypt in the south, upstream, and Lower Egypt in the delta. Egyptian tradition credits a king from the south with uniting them. A carved stone palette names a king Narmer and shows him wearing the white crown of the south on one side and the red crown of the north on the other. Later pharaohs wore a double crown that combined the two. The custom of grouping kings into numbered dynasties comes from Manetho, an Egyptian priest who wrote a history in Greek in the 3rd century BCE.

Old, Middle and New Kingdoms

Historians divide Egypt’s long history into kingdoms, times of strong central rule, separated by intermediate periods when power split. The Met gives these dates: Old Kingdom about 2649 to 2150 BCE, the age of the pyramids; Middle Kingdom about 2030 to 1640 BCE; and New Kingdom about 1550 to 1070 BCE, when Egypt ruled an empire reaching into the Levant and Nubia. Other museums and textbooks shift these dates by a few decades, because Egyptians counted years by reigns and some reign lengths are unknown.

The Great Pyramid

The Great Pyramid at Giza was built for King Khufu of the 4th Dynasty, in the 26th century BCE. It rose to 146 metres, and it stayed the tallest human-made structure for more than 3,800 years. The builders were not chained slaves, as old films liked to show. Excavations near Giza uncovered a town for the workforce with bakeries and breweries, along with cemeteries where workers were buried near the king’s monument, which points to organised crews who were fed and housed by the state.

Writing, tombs and daily life

According to the British Museum, writing appeared in Egypt around 3250 BCE, at almost the same time as in Mesopotamia, to organise the storage and distribution of goods. Hieroglyphs were carved on monuments, while scribes wrote faster joined-up scripts on papyrus. Much of what survives comes from tombs, because Egyptians believed the dead needed their bodies, food, furniture and spells in the next life. That is why mummies and painted tombs fill museum galleries, even though most Egyptians spent their lives farming, paying taxes in grain and raising families in mud-brick villages.

The tomb of Tutankhamun, who ruled about 1336 to 1327 BCE, was found nearly intact by Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon in 1922. Later Egypt was ruled by Persians and then, after Alexander the Great, by the Greek-speaking Ptolemies. Cleopatra VII, the last of them, died in 30 BCE, and Egypt became a Roman province.