Social Studies · Grades 6-8
Three thousand years of pharaohs, pyramids and picture writing, all fed by one river.
Egypt is mostly desert, but a narrow strip of farmland follows the Nile. For about 3,000 years, that strip was home to one of the longest-lasting civilizations in history.
On this page you'll travel through Egypt's timeline, meet its rulers, read what a Greek visitor wrote about it, and write your own name in hieroglyphs.
Did you know? Cleopatra VII lived closer in time to us than to the people who built the Great Pyramid. About 2,500 years separate the pyramid from Cleopatra.
Historians split Egypt's long story into kingdoms (times when one ruler controlled the whole country) and intermediate periods (messier times when power was split up). All dates here are BCE, "Before Common Era," so the numbers get smaller as you move forward in time.
c. 3100 – 2686 BCE
Upper Egypt (the south) and Lower Egypt (the north) become one kingdom. Tradition credits a king named Narmer (or Menes). Kings rule from Memphis, and hieroglyphic writing takes shape.
c. 2686 – 2181 BCE
Strong kings build giant stone tombs. Djoser's Step Pyramid comes first, then Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza, around 2560 BCE.
c. 2181 – 2055 BCE First Intermediate Period: the kingdom splits as local leaders grow powerful.
c. 2055 – 1650 BCE
King Mentuhotep II reunites Egypt. This is a golden age for writing and stories, and Egypt builds forts and trades to the south in Nubia.
c. 1650 – 1550 BCE Second Intermediate Period: rulers from western Asia called the Hyksos control the north.
c. 1550 – 1069 BCE
Egypt's armies push into Nubia and the Near East. Kings are buried in the Valley of the Kings. This is the era of Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and Ramesses II.
c. 1069 – 664 BCE Third Intermediate Period: power is split again, and for a time kings from Kush (Nubia) rule Egypt.
664 – 332 BCE
Egyptian kings take back control, but the Persian Empire conquers Egypt in 525 BCE and again later.
332 – 30 BCE
Alexander the Great takes Egypt in 332 BCE. After he dies, his general Ptolemy starts a Greek-speaking royal family that rules from Alexandria. It ends with Cleopatra VII, and Rome takes over in 30 BCE.
Period dates follow The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt (2000). Ruler dates are common estimates and differ by a few years from book to book.
Each card covers one part of Egyptian life. Read them in any order.
Geography
Egypt gets almost no rain. Its secret was the Nile, the longest river in Africa, flowing north to the Mediterranean Sea.
Every summer, rains far to the south made the Nile rise and spill over its banks. This yearly inundation (flood) left behind rich black mud, perfect for crops.
Egyptians called their land Kemet, "the Black Land," after that mud. Their year had three seasons: Akhet (the flood), Peret (growing) and Shemu (harvest).
Government
Egypt's king is often called the pharaoh, from Egyptian words meaning "great house" (the palace). Egyptians only started using it for the king himself in the New Kingdom.
People believed the pharaoh stood between the gods and everyone else. His job was to keep ma'at, the right order of the world: truth, justice and balance.
A few women ruled as pharaoh too. The most famous is Hatshepsut.
Building
Pyramids were royal tombs. The first big one was the Step Pyramid of King Djoser, designed by his official Imhotep. Djoser ruled from about 2667 to 2648 BCE.
The Great Pyramid at Giza was built for King Khufu around 2560 BCE. It was originally about 147 meters (481 feet) tall and used roughly 2.3 million stone blocks.
Who built it? Not crowds of slaves, as old movies show. Archaeologists found a whole town of pyramid builders near Giza, with bakeries, barracks and workshops. Skilled craftsmen worked alongside crews of ordinary Egyptians taking turns doing required work for the king. They were fed bread, beer and meat, and some were buried in tombs beside the pyramids.
Writing
Hieroglyphs are Egypt's picture-signs, used from about 3200 BCE. Some signs stand for sounds, others for whole ideas. Vowels were not written at all.
Scribes also used faster, joined-up scripts called hieratic and later Demotic for everyday writing.
After the last hieroglyphs were carved (in 394 CE, at Philae temple), nobody could read them for about 1,400 years. Then French soldiers found the Rosetta Stone in 1799. It repeats one royal decree from 196 BCE in hieroglyphs, Demotic and ancient Greek. Scholars could read the Greek, and in 1822 Jean-François Champollion used it, other inscriptions and the Coptic language to crack the code, building on clues from Thomas Young.
Everyday life
Most Egyptians were farmers growing wheat, barley and flax. Bread and beer were the main foods for almost everyone, rich or poor.
Homes were made of mud brick, and clothes were made of linen (cloth woven from flax). Kids played with balls, dolls and toy animals, and adults loved a board game called senet.
Only a few people could read. Boys trained for years to become scribes, which was a respected job. Women could own property, run businesses and go to court, which was unusual in the ancient world.
Religion
Egyptians worshipped many gods, such as Ra (the sun), Osiris (ruler of the dead), Isis (his wife, a powerful protector) and Anubis (the jackal-headed god of embalming).
They believed life could continue after death, so the body had to be kept. Mummification dried the body with a natural salt called natron and wrapped it in linen.
In the "weighing of the heart," shown in the Book of the Dead, a person's heart was weighed against the feather of Ma'at. A heart heavy with wrongdoing meant no afterlife.
Egypt had well over a hundred rulers in 3,000 years, so this is just a starter set. All dates are approximate.
Often named as the first king of a united Egypt. A carved stone called the Narmer Palette shows him wearing the crowns of both the south and the north.
An Old Kingdom king whose tomb is the biggest pyramid ever built in Egypt. The only complete statue of him ever found is a tiny ivory figure about 7.5 cm (3 inches) tall.
She began as a regent (a ruler standing in for a young king) and then crowned herself pharaoh. She sent a trading trip to the land of Punt and built a grand temple at Deir el-Bahari.
He put one god, the Aten (the sun disk), above all others and built a brand-new capital city at Amarna. After he died, Egyptians went back to their old gods.
He became king at about nine years old and died at about nineteen. He was a minor king, but in 1922 Howard Carter found his tomb nearly untouched, full of gold and everyday objects.
A warrior-builder who fought the Hittites at the Battle of Kadesh and later signed one of the earliest known peace treaties with them. His giant statues guard the temples at Abu Simbel.
The last active ruler of the Greek-speaking Ptolemy family, and, according to the Greek writer Plutarch, the only one of them who bothered to learn the Egyptian language. She allied with the Romans Julius Caesar and Mark Antony. After her death, Egypt became a Roman province.
Nobody alive today met a pharaoh. So how can we say anything about them? Historians piece it together from several kinds of evidence.
Think like a historian: when two clues disagree, ask who made each one, when, and why.
A primary source is something made at the time by someone who was there or nearly there. Herodotus was a Greek writer who visited Egypt around 450 BCE and described it in his Histories, Book II. These words come from G. C. Macaulay's English translation (1890).
"the Egypt to which the Hellenes come in ships is a land which has been won by the Egyptians as an addition, and that it is a gift of the river"
What it means: "Hellenes" means Greeks. Herodotus means that the farmland of northern Egypt was built up from Nile mud. That's why Egypt is often called "the gift of the Nile."
"Of Egypt however I shall make my report at length, because it has wonders more in number than any other land, and works too it has to show as much as any land, which are beyond expression great"
Why it matters: Even 2,500 years ago, Egypt already seemed ancient and amazing to visitors. "Works" here means great buildings.
"First with a crooked iron tool they draw out the brain through the nostrils"
Look closer: Herodotus also says the body was kept in natron "for seventy days." Experts today think the drying took about 40 days and the whole process about 70. CT scans show many brains were removed through the nose, but some mummies still have theirs. (British Museum, What is mummification? Notes for teachers)
"they worked by a hundred thousand men at a time, for each three months continually."
Check the evidence: Herodotus gives a figure of 100,000 men (he says this about the stone-hauling crews), but he heard the story about 2,000 years after the pyramid was built. Archaeologists now think the workforce was much smaller: about 20,000 to 25,000 people in all, counting bakers, toolmakers and other helpers, working in shifts. This is a case where a visitor's report and the evidence in the ground disagree.
Egyptian royal names were written inside a cartouche, an oval loop tied at one end. Try writing your own name below.
Heads up: this uses a modern, simplified "sound alphabet" built from Egyptian signs that each stood for one consonant (called uniliteral signs). Egyptians did not spell names letter by letter like this. They skipped most vowels, mixed in signs for whole syllables and ideas, had no sign for V, and only added one for L in late times. Think of it as a fun code, not real Egyptian.
Your cartouche will appear here.
Each cartouche spells an Egypt word from this page in the same sound alphabet. Can you read it?
Score: 0 / 5
The lion for L comes from late times: Greek-speaking rulers like Ptolemy and Cleopatra used it to spell their names. Real hieroglyphs could also be written right to left or top to bottom. Here we write left to right so it's easy to read.
Ten questions on everything above. Pick one answer for each, then check your score.
There's no single right answer to these. Back up your ideas with something from this page.