LO3

Today in class we read pages 20-29, which is LO3 called Land of the Pharaohs: Egypt.The reading was on the Egyptians. The Egyptian civilization was more stable that that of Mesopotamia because political and sectional conflicts did not break the countries unity.The traditions of Egyptian civilizations became so strong that they flourished even in its last thousand years. Egypt is along the lower part of the Nile. The Nile is a river that is four thousand miles long and stretches from Central Africa to the Mediterranean. The country was divided into two sections called the "Two Lands". The Nile was very important to the Egypt's life. It was the cycle of labor and of life itself depended on its annual flooding and receding, and the " gift of the Nile" provided the wealth for the earliest Egyptian civilization. Then around 3100 BC the Two Lands were unified under a single king. The countries rulers from then on are usually know as pharaohs.  The pharaohs alot of responsibility and power. The Egyptians saw the pharaoh as a god. The woman 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 a god who made them pregnant and a god yo whom they gave birth. The King's Principle Wife was usually his sister or half-sister. The pharaoh had many wives though and they were usually daughter of high officials. The wives lived apart from the pharaoh but if one caught his eye he could give her power like the Mother of the Pharaoh had. The ordinary women and men benefited from the pharaohs rule. Daughters inherited property equally with sons, and wives could divorce their husbands. Many Egyptian  deities were conceived in the form of animals or animal heads or bodies. The Egyptian priests and rulers often speculated that behind all the different deities they worshiped  there lay a single divine power. One god who had created all the others, perhaps or who ruled, protected, and nourished all the nations of the world. In 1800 Egyptians had come yo believe that the soul of every deceased person has to stand before Osiris, the ruler of the underworld for judgment. Osiris looked at there good and bad deeds in life and weighed there heart. Then he decided if the person would go to everlasting life in a garden paradise or into the crocodile jaws of a monster. Writing in Egypt started just like it did in Sumer but for different reasons. The Egyptians started writing for the religious needs of the rulers.The earliest Egyptian writings were the hieroglyphs which came from the Greek word for " sacred carvings". It started in 1300 B.C as part of carvings and paintings intended to honor the pharaohs. The hieroglyphs were actual pictures of real-life or mythical creatures and objects, but most of these pictures also stood for whole words or separate sounds of words. They were mostly found written in temples and other monuments. The Egyptian name of the hieroglyphs was" the writing of the words of god." Soon after there became shorter versions of writing like the hieratic script, and then in 700B.C the demotic script. In Egypt astronomers created a calender with twelve equal months of thirty days and five "free" days at the end to make up the 365 days of the solar year. The most spectacular thing about Egypt was their buildings.The Egyptian built pyramids. Pyramids are a massive structure with sloping sides that met at an apex, used as a royal tomb in ancient Egypt. The largest pyramid was built by order of King Khufu who ruled about 2650 B.C. The pyramid is located at Giza, the Great Pyramid measures 476 feet in height and 760 feet on each side of its base. The Egyptians also built temples. The temple of Amon at Karnak was begun about 1530 B.C and completed about 1300 B.C. It is the largest religious building ever constructed.. Egypt had its up and down and sometimes the two sides argued but it remained in power for a long time.