Ancient Egypt

Egypt is mostly hot, dry desert. It almost never rains! So how did people live there? The answer is the Nile River, the longest river in Africa.

Every summer, the Nile flooded. When the water went back down, it left behind rich, black mud called silt. Crops grew great in it! Egyptians called their land Kemet, "the Black Land," because of this dark mud. The desert was Deshret, "the Red Land."

Here's a tricky fact: the Nile flows north. So Upper Egypt is in the south, and Lower Egypt is in the north, where the river meets the sea!

Egyptian society was shaped like a pyramid. The most powerful person was at the very top, all alone. The most people were at the bottom.

Could you move up the pyramid? Sometimes! A farmer's son who learned to read and write could become a scribe.

Egyptians believed in more than 1,000 gods and goddesses! Each one took care of something in nature or in life. Many gods had a human body and an animal head.

The afterlife

Egyptians believed that when you died, your life kept going in a new place called the afterlife. But first you had to pass a test called the Weighing of the Heart.

The god Anubis put your heart on one side of a scale. On the other side was the Feather of Truth. If you lived a good life, your heart was as light as the feather. You went to the Field of Reeds, a perfect place like Egypt with no sickness. If your heart was heavy with bad deeds, a monster named Ammit gobbled it up!

Egyptians believed the body was needed in the afterlife. So they found a way to keep it from rotting. They turned it into a mummy. Making a mummy took about 70 days!

Special priests did the work. One priest wore a jackal mask to look like Anubis, the god of mummies.

The organs went into four special containers called canopic jars. But the heart stayed inside the body, because it was needed for the Weighing of the Heart!

Death masks

A death mask was placed over the mummy's face. It showed what the person looked like, so their spirit could find its body again.

The most famous mask belongs to King Tutankhamun (say it: toot-ahn-KAH-mun), or King Tut. He became pharaoh at about 9 years old! His mask is made of about 22 pounds of gold with blue stones and colored glass.

In 1922, Howard Carter found King Tut's tomb, and it was still full of treasure! Most royal tombs had been robbed long ago.

Make your own mask!

Pyramids were giant tombs for pharaohs. The first one, the Step Pyramid, was designed by a genius named Imhotep for King Djoser. It looks like a stack of giant blocks.

The biggest is the Great Pyramid of Giza, built for King Khufu about 4,500 years ago. For almost 4,000 years, it was the tallest building people had ever made!

The builders were NOT slaves. Scientists found the town where the workers lived. They were paid with bread, beer, and meat, and doctors cared for them when they got hurt.

Egyptians wrote with pictures called hieroglyphs. There were more than 700 of them! Some pictures stood for whole words, and some stood for sounds, like our letters.

They wrote on stone walls and on a kind of paper made from the papyrus plant, which grew along the Nile. Only scribes knew how to read and write it all.

For hundreds of years, nobody could read hieroglyphs. Then in 1799, soldiers found the Rosetta Stone. It had the same message written three ways. In 1822, a man named Jean-François Champollion used it to crack the code!

BCE means "Before Common Era." It counts the years before the year 1. So BCE years count down, like a countdown to a rocket launch. The year 3100 BCE came way before 1500 BCE!

Ancient Egypt lasted so long that Cleopatra, the last pharaoh, lived closer in time to us than to the builders of the Great Pyramid!