Ancient Egypt, with its unique monuments and works of art, has left very impressive remains. There is also a large corpus of preserved texts, which adds to our understanding of the cultural meanings of these works, and how this civilization functioned.
Ancient Egyptian civilization emerged between 3200 and 3000 bc, when a large region stretching along the lower Nile River and Delta was unified and then controlled by a centralized kingship (see 5.5). Its distinctive characteristics - the important institutions of kingship and state religion, monumental tombs and temples, the art which decorated these monuments, and hieroglyphic writing - emerged at this time and continued for over three thousand years, until Christianity became established throughout Egypt. Because of its great longevity, Egyptian civilization provides a unique opportunity to study the changes and developments of an early civilization over a very long span of time.
Civilization is a complex form of culture, the learned means by which human groups adapt and alter their physical and social environments. Before the Egypt of the pharaohs there were many earlier cultures, from the hunting and gathering societies of the Paleolithic (old Stone Age) to the Neolithic, when agriculture was introduced in the Nile Valley ca. 6000-5000 bc (see 4.8). During the Predynastic Period, from ca. 4000-3000 bc, when there is evidence of different cultures in Upper (southern) and Lower (northern) Egypt, social and economic changes were taking place that would lead to the emergence of Egyptian civilization (see 5.1). While this book focuses mainly on the archaeology of ancient Egyptian civilization - pharaonic Egypt - an overview of Egyptian prehistory is crucial for understanding the particular type of civilization that arose there.
Dynastic Egypt was the almost 3,000-year time span of ancient Egyptian civilization. Although we do not have a full listing in Egyptian of the long tradition of royal dynasties, we do have one based on Egyptian traditions that was compiled in Greek by an Egyptian priest of the 3rd century bc named Manetho. There are 31 dynasties of Egyptian kings, including foreign rulers, after which Egypt was ruled by the Ptolemies, kings and queens of Macedonian descent who controlled Egypt after Alexander the Great’s conquest (see 10.1). With the defeat of the last Ptolemaic queen, cleopatra VII, and her lover, the Roman general Marc Antony, Egypt became a province of the Roman Empire.
World History
