Interesting facts about Egypt:
- King Naasrmer was the first to unite Upper and Lower Egypt in about 3000 BC
- Originally Lower Egypt was considered to be from Aswan southward. Upper Egypt was from Aswan north to Alexandria.
- The Nile is and was the key to Egypt’s agricultural wealth. It is considered to be the longest river in the world.
- Modern day Egypt has Libya on its western border, Sudan to the south, The Gaza strip and Israel to the east and the Mediterranean Sea to the north.
- The word Pharaoh comes from the Egyptian “Per-aa” which meant Great House. It was the title given to royalty from the New Kingdom (1550 BC) onward.
- In the Timeline that follows, the most important or influential kings and Pharaohs are listed, however between King Narmer and the Ptolemaic kings, there were 285 Pharaohs. Some are known to Egyptologists and others are merely inferred by the hieroglyphs.
- The last female Pharaoh was Cleopatra VII. This is the Cleopatra we know from the movies about her. She reigned from 51 – 30 BC at first with her father Ptolemy XII and later on her own.
- The other queen of note was Hatshepsut, elder daughter of Tuthmosis I. She married her brother Tuthmosis II and took the throne from him. She reigned from 1479 -1458 BC and was known as one of Egypt’s most successful Pharaohs.
- Probably the most well known of the Pharaohs were Ramesses II and Tutankamun but for different reasons. Ramesses was known as the Great Pharaoh. His statues are in many places we visited and his Temple at Abu Simbel was remarkable in that it was carved into a mountain. He reigned from 1279 – 1213 BC.
- Tutankamun on the other hand reigned for only about nine years until he was nineteen (1333 - 1324 BC). One of his predecessors, Akhenaten, had changed the priesthood to honour a minor god, Aten. Tutankamun reversed this and changed his original name from Tutankhaten to Tutankamun (sometimes amen) in honour of Amun-Ra the father of the gods. He is probably most famous due to the discovery by Howard Carter in 1922 who uncovered his tomb in the Valley of the Kings. Since Tut was buried below another Pharaoh, the tomb was untouched by grave robbers and many treasures were found.
- Hieroglyphic translations were unknown until the discovery of the Rosetta stone in 1798 by the French. It was a Ptolemaic decree in about 239 BC giving “Health, victory, power and all other good things.” to the ruler. The Rosetta stone had three sets of text from top to bottom, Hieroglyphs, Demotic scripts and Greek. In 1814 Champollion, a French classical scholar discovered that Demotic and Coptic were the same language differing only in their alphabets. He worked through a number of the Books of the Dead and determined rough translations of the Hieroglyphs.
- Pharaoh's names were always enclosed in a cartouche so it was relatively easy to determine who a ruler might be. In the case of the hieroglyph (Left) this is the cartouche of "Tutakhamun Hekaiunushema, Son of Re (Ra) Living image of Amun, Ruler of Heliopolis." (The capital of Lower Egypt at the time of his reign.)
|
