From the first farmers on the black earth of the Nile to the pyramids and the people who built them, Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and Ramesses II, the kings of Kush, the Ptolemies and Cleopatra, Roman rule, the last hieroglyph and the scholars who learned to read them again.
Stop 01 · c. 5000–3600 BCE
A Gift of the River
Picture a strip of black earth running through a desert. The Egyptians named their country Kemet after that dark soil, and the Greek traveller Herodotus called the land a gift from the river. Each year the Nile rose, flooded and left fresh earth along its banks. As the Sahara dried out, people came to depend on the water. By about 5000 BCE farmers were at work in the Faiyum and the Delta, and the Badarian and Naqada cultures followed in the south. By 3600 BCE Hierakonpolis had many neighbourhoods and ran for over three kilometres beside the flood plain. Its leaders had grand ideas about death. Their cemetery has given up 52 animals, including an African elephant, a young hippopotamus and two baboons.
Predynastic collage (new version)Collage of: Image:Diorite Vase Neqada II Predynastic Ancient Egypt Field Museum.jpg by… · CC BY-SA 3.0 · Wikimedia Commons
On the map
People drawn to the river as the Sahara dries · Migration
Picture a strip of black earth running through a desert. The Egyptians named their country Kemet after that dark soil, and the Greek traveller Herodotus called the land a gift from the river. Each year the Nile rose, flooded and left fresh earth along its banks. As the Sahara dried out, people came to depend on the water. By about 5000 BCE farmers were at work in the Faiyum and the Delta, and the Badarian and Naqada cultures followed in the south. By 3600 BCE Hierakonpolis had many neighbourhoods and ran for over three kilometres beside the flood plain. Its leaders had grand ideas about death. Their cemetery has given up 52 animals, including an African elephant, a young hippopotamus and two baboons.
Some of Egypt's earliest writing comes from a tomb. Around 3300 BCE a ruler was buried at Abydos in a chamber now called U-j, with hundreds of imported jars that seem to have held wine. Small ivory labels, pierced for tying, carried scratched signs naming towns. Tokens from Abydos are carbon-dated to about 3400 to 3200 BCE, close to the age of Sumer's script. Many scholars think Egypt's system grew up at home, though some see a link. Hieroglyphs mixed signs for sounds, signs for whole words and silent signs that made the meaning clear. Scribes soon had a faster hand, hieratic, and from the First Dynasty a new surface: papyrus. The oldest surviving roll, from the tomb of an official called Hemaka, is blank.
Egyptians spoke of two lands: Upper Egypt, the narrow valley in the south, and Lower Egypt, the Delta in the north. The names follow the Nile, which runs northward to the sea. Around 3100 BCE the two became one kingdom. The most famous witness is a siltstone slab about 64 centimetres tall, found at Hierakonpolis in 1897–98. It shows King Narmer wearing the crowns of both lands and raising a club over an enemy. What it means is disputed. Some read a real conquest. Others read a boast about unity already won, perhaps after long economic growth in the south. Later tradition called the first king Menes. He may have been Narmer, or a title, or several men blended into one.
Royal tombs now climbed into the sky. At Saqqara, King Djoser's monument rose in six great tiers to about 62.5 metres, and most Egyptologists credit its design to his vizier, Imhotep. Sneferu's builders pushed further. A pyramid at Meidum failed, the Bent Pyramid followed at Dahshur, and the Red Pyramid there became Egypt's first successful true pyramid. Then Khufu built at Giza. His pyramid stood 146.6 metres high, cased in white limestone and made from an estimated 2.3 million blocks. It stayed the tallest thing humans had made for more than 3,700 years. Khafre and Menkaure added their own beside it. Egyptians called Khufu's monument Akhet-Khufu, the Horizon of Khufu.
Who did the work? In 2013 a French team led by Pierre Tallet found papyri at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea, written late in Khufu's reign by an inspector named Merer. With about forty boatmen, he carried white limestone from the Tura quarries over the water to Giza, perhaps 200 blocks a month. His log never says what the stone was for, though Tallet thinks it clad the Great Pyramid. South of the Sphinx, archaeologists have uncovered the town that served the builders: over seven hectares of bakeries, kitchens, workshops and royal grain silos, for bread and beer. Herodotus told of a tyrant's forced labour. The camps point to conscripted Egyptians, fed by the state. Once Menkaure's pyramid was finished, the town was dismantled.
No kingdom lasts unchanged. Pepi II is said to have reigned for nearly a century and to have outlived his heirs, while provincial governors grew stronger. Drought and famine may have played a part, and after about 2181 BCE Egypt broke into rival regions. Thebes put it back together. Mentuhotep II defeated Herakleopolis, and by about 2040 BCE the country was whole again. Senusret III then drove south into Nubia, strengthening river forts at Buhen and Semna. His border stela warns that a successor who fails to hold the line "is not my son". Writers flourished too. The Story of Sinuhe, about an exile who longs for home, survives in more copies than any other Egyptian narrative.
Religion ran through all of this. At its heart lay ma'at, the idea of harmony and truth. Temples were homes for gods, and after the morning rites the sanctuary doors were locked, with worshippers kept to the outer courts. The best-loved story belonged to Osiris, a just king killed by his jealous brother Set. His wife Isis recovered him, and he became judge of the dead. From the Twelfth Dynasty, crowds at Abydos watched his death and return acted out, with mock battles. Those who could not afford a grave there put up a stone with their names. Spells once kept for kings and the elite spread too. In the New Kingdom, anyone with money could buy a Book of the Dead.
Egypt had a rival. In what is now Sudan, a Nubian state had been growing at Kerma since about 2500 BCE, and after 1750 it reached its peak. The city spread over some 25 hectares around a huge mudbrick temple, the Western Deffufa. Its kings lay under great mounds with many human sacrifices and the skulls of thousands of cattle. When Egypt weakened, Egypt's own Nubian forts shifted their allegiance to Kerma. Then, between about 1575 and 1550 BCE, Kerma struck deep into Egypt. In 2003 British Egyptologists cleaning a tomb at Elkab read a red-painted account of the invasion, aided by men of Punt and the Medjay. Egyptian royal statues were carried south, apparently as trophies.
At the same time, the north had foreign kings. Manetho, writing long afterwards, told of invaders from the east. The digging says otherwise. People from the Levant had settled at Avaris in the eastern Delta from about 1800 BCE. Of 75 people whose teeth were tested there, 53 per cent grew up outside the Delta, and the researchers argue for a takeover from within. Egyptians called these rulers "rulers of foreign lands", which became our word Hyksos. Thebes fought back. King Kamose's stela says his men seized a messenger carrying a plea from the Hyksos king to Kush, though some scholars suspect parts of it record plans more than deeds. His successor Ahmose finished the war, and Avaris seems to have been abandoned.
When the boy Thutmose III took the throne, his stepmother Hatshepsut governed as regent. By about his seventh year she had become pharaoh alongside him, the senior of the pair. Her images began to show a male king with a false beard, while her inscriptions kept their feminine word endings. Egypt was mostly at peace. Her temple at Deir el-Bahri rose against the Theban cliffs, and its walls record a voyage to Punt that brought back 31 live myrrh trees. After she died around 1458 BCE, Thutmose III won at Megiddo by taking a narrow road his enemies did not expect, then fought on to the Euphrates. Late in his reign, her name and statues began to be destroyed.
Egypt was now rich. "In my brother's country gold is as plentiful as dust," one foreign king wrote to its court. Then a pharaoh tried to remake its heaven. Amenhotep IV turned state worship to the Aten, the disc of the sun, and in his fifth year took the name Akhenaten. By one account the old gods' temples were closed by his ninth. Whether this was true monotheism is still debated. With Queen Nefertiti he built a new capital, Akhetaten, the Horizon of the Aten, on a desert bay roughly midway between Thebes and Memphis. We call it Amarna. Art there took on a startling new style. After his death his monuments were pulled down, and later records called him "the enemy".
The throne soon passed to a child called Tutankhaten, "living image of the Aten". In the third year of his reign he changed his name to Tutankhamun, and a stela at Karnak announced the return of the old temples and cults. He died at about 19. A 2010 study suggested malaria and a broken leg, but the cause is still debated. Thieves broke into his tomb twice within a few years, and officials sealed it again. Then the desert hid it. On 4 November 1922, workers for Howard Carter and Lord Carnarvon uncovered a step. Inside lay 5,398 objects and a coffin of solid gold weighing 110.4 kilograms. Since November 2025 the collection has been shown together at the Grand Egyptian Museum.
Ramesses II ruled for 66 years and left his name everywhere. He built a new capital, Pi-Ramesses, in the eastern Delta, close to his wars in Syria. In 1274 BCE the Hittites nearly killed him at Kadesh, a clash now generally judged a stalemate, and some years later the two powers made peace. He is thought to have died at about 90, with about 100 children. His most daring work stands far to the south in Nubia. At Abu Simbel, 20-metre figures of the king were cut into the cliff. In the 1960s rising water behind the Aswan dam threatened them, so the temples were sawn into over 1,000 blocks and raised 65 metres, with half the cost paid by 48 countries.
Now meet people who were never kings. At Deir el-Medina, west of Thebes, the craftsmen who cut and painted royal tombs lived with their families in about 68 houses. They were state employees, paid in rations, and many villagers could at least read. They wrote on flakes of limestone, and about 5,000 of these came from one well nearby. One flake lists forty men in the 40th year of Ramesses II, with the days each missed work. Illness was the commonest reason. One man was stung by a scorpion. Others had sore eyes, a burial, a festival, or a scribe who wanted stones carried. Ten cited a wife's or daughter's period. Only two men on the list never missed a day.
Around 1178 BCE Ramesses III beat off the Sea Peoples, a coalition that came by land and water, and carved the fight on his temple at Medinet Habu. The victory did not save the state. In his 29th year grain for the tomb makers stopped coming. They downed tools, sat in temples and marched past the guard post shouting "we are hungry!" It is the earliest strike known. A palace plot soon followed: a CT scan in 2012 revealed a deep cut across the king's throat. Under Ramesses IX officials were inspecting robbed tombs. Later the royal mummies were moved to a hiding place. By about 1069 BCE power was split between kings at Tanis and the high priests of Amun at Thebes.
Now Kush took over. Kush had risen again around Napata, where Amun had a great temple below Jebel Barkal. Its king Kashta gained Upper Egypt by installing his daughter as God's Wife of Amun. His son Piye marched north, and his victory stela says Memphis fell "like a cloudburst". For nearly a century Kushite kings ruled Egypt as the 25th Dynasty. They brought back the pyramid, at el-Kurru and Nuri, and about 255 Nubian pyramids are known today. Taharqa was crowned at Memphis in 690 BCE. Assyria ended it. Esarhaddon took Memphis in 671, and in 663 Ashurbanipal's army sacked Thebes, by its own account. Kushite kings went home, and went on ruling there for centuries.
Psamtik I had been schooled at Nineveh and placed in power by the Assyrians. By about 656 BCE he held all of Egypt, with soldiers from Caria and Greece behind him. About 593 BCE Psamtik II sent an army into Nubia that sacked Napata, and in time Kush's royal centre shifted south to Meroë. In 525 the Persian king Cambyses captured Psamtik III, and Egypt became a Persian province. At Elephantine, on the southern border, Persia's garrison included a Jewish community with its own temple to Yahweh beside that of the Egyptian god Khnum. Their Aramaic papyri survive. Native kings later returned, until Artaxerxes III invaded in 343 BCE. Nectanebo II fled to Nubia, the last native ruler of the whole country.
Late in 332 BCE Alexander of Macedon entered Egypt and was welcomed as a liberator. At the oasis of Siwa the oracle pronounced him son of Amun, and he founded a city on the coast before leaving in early 331. After his death his general Ptolemy took Egypt, and in 321 seized Alexander's body. The Ptolemies ruled as Greek kings and as pharaohs. Alexandria gained its lighthouse, one of the wonders of the ancient world, and a great Library that copied books taken from ships in the harbour. The Mouseion beside it gave us the word museum. Greek stayed the language of power, though, and heavy taxes fed revolt. In 196 BCE a great rising around Thebes was still unbeaten.
The last of the line took power in 51 BCE, aged 18. Cleopatra VII was Macedonian Greek by descent, yet Plutarch says she spoke with Ethiopians, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Medes and Parthians in their own tongues, and that earlier kings had never troubled to learn Egyptian. Julius Caesar arrived in 48, and she bore a son, Caesarion, said to be his. After his murder she joined Mark Antony, meeting him at Tarsus in 41. Octavian beat them at Actium on 2 September 31 BCE, when her squadron pulled out and Antony followed. In August 30 both were dead. Plutarch tells of an asp, then admits that "the truth of the matter no one knows".
Egypt now answered to the emperor through a prefect. Its grain sailed to feed Rome, and a poll tax fell hardest on native Egyptians. In the south, Kush pushed back. Strabo says an army of "Ethiopians" seized Syene, Elephantine and Philae and pulled down the statues of Caesar. The Romans struck back and razed Napata, but envoys of a one-eyed queen he calls Candace went to Augustus on Samos, and the tribute was dropped. A bronze head of Augustus, apparently looted in the raid, was buried under temple steps at Meroë and dug up in 1910. Inside Egypt old ways blended with new. Families mummified their dead and laid lifelike Greek-style portraits over them, with Egyptian gods close by.
A new faith was changing Egypt. Anthony, a hermit born about 251, went out into the desert and became known as the father of monks. After 324 emperors backed Christianity. Egyptians were by now writing their language in Greek letters, with a few extra signs taken from Demotic, and we call the result Coptic. The old scripts faded. On 24 August 394 a priest at Philae carved a figure of the god Mandulis and the last known hieroglyphs, dedicated "for all time and eternity". In 415 a mob killed the philosopher Hypatia in Alexandria. Justinian closed the temple between 535 and 537. An Arab army under Amr ibn al-As crossed in 639, and by 642 Roman rule had ended.
For well over a thousand years, no one could read the signs. In July 1799 French soldiers near Rosetta found a slab bearing a decree of 196 BCE in hieroglyphs, Demotic and Greek. Britain took it in 1801, and it has been in the British Museum since 1802. Thomas Young worked out the signs for Ptolemy's name. Jean-François Champollion, who had learned Coptic from a priest in Paris, went further. On 14 September 1822 he read the names Ramesses and Thutmose in texts from Abu Simbel, and within weeks he had published his system. Young felt robbed of credit. The kings, scribes and strikers could speak again. And Coptic, their language's last stage, is still heard in Egyptian churches today.