A SHORT HISTORY OF EGYPT
(adapted from H.G. Wells' The Outline of History)
Parallel with the ancient beginnings of civilization in Sumeria, a similar process was going on in Egypt. It is still a matter of dispute which was the more ancient of these two beginnings or how far they had a common origin or derived one from the other.
The story of the Nile valley from the dawn of its traceable history until the time of Alexander the Great is not very dissimilar from that of Babylonia, but while Babylonia lay open on every side to invasion, Egypt was protected by desert to the west and by desert and sea to the east, while in the south she had only African peoples. Consequently her history is best broken by the invasions of strange races than is the history of Assyria and Babylon, and until towards the eighth century B.C., when she fell under an Ethiopian dynasty, whenever a conqueror did come into her story, he came in from Asia by way of the Isthmus of Suez.
The Stone Age remains in Egypt are of very uncertain date; there are Palaeolithic and Neolithic remains. It is not certain whether the Neolithic pastoral people who left those remains were the direct ancestors of the later Egyptians. In many respects they differed entirely from their ancestors. They buried their dead, but before they buried them they cut up the bodies and apparently ate portions of the flesh. They seem to have done this out of a feeling of reverence for the departed; the dead were "eaten with honour," according to the phrase of Sir Flinders Petrie. It may have been that the survivors hoped to retain thereby some vestige of the strength and virtue that had died. Traces of similar savage customs have been found in the long barrows that were scattered over Western Europe before the spreading of the Aryan peoples.
About 5000 B.C. or earlier, the traces of these primitive peoples cease, and the true Egyptians appear on the scene. The former people were hut builders and at a comparatively low stage of Neolithic culture; the latter were already a civilized Neolithic people--they used brick and wood buildings instead of their predecessors' hovels, and they were working stone. Very soon they passed into the Bronze Age. They possessed a system of picture-writing almost as developed as the contemporary writing of the Sumerians, but quite different in character. Possibly there was an irruption from Southern Arabia by way of Aden of a fresh people, who came into Upper Egypt and descended slowly towards the delta of the Nile. Their gods and their ways, like their picture-writing, were very different indeed from the Sumerian. One of the earliest known figures of a deity is that of the hippopotamus goddess, and so very distinctively African.
The clay of the Nile is not so fine and plastic as the Sumerian clay, and the Egyptians made no use of it for writing. But they early resorted to strips of the papyrus reed fastened together, from whose name is derived our word "paper." Assyrian writing was done with a style or stamp fashioned to make a wedge-shaped impression; Egyptian with a brush. To that we owe the far greater expressiveness of the latter.
The broad outline of the history of Egypt is simpler than the history of Mesopotamia. It has long been the custom to divide the rulers of Egypt into a succession of Dynasties, and in speaking of the periods of Egyptian history it is usual to speak of the first, fourth, fourteenth, and on, Dynasty. The Egyptians were ultimately conquered by the Persians after their establishment in Babylon; and when finally Egypt fell to Alexander the Great, in 332 B.C., it was Dynasty XXXI that came to an end.
In that long history of over 4,000 years--a much longer period than that between the career of Alexander the Great and the present day--certain broad phases of development may be noted here. There was a phase known as the "old kingdom," which began with the consolidation of the Northern and Southern Kingdoms by Menes, and culminated in the Ivth Dynasty; this dynasty marks a period of wealth and splendour, and its monarchs were obsessed by such a passion for making monuments for themselves as no men have ever before or since had a chance to display and gratify. It was Cheops (3733 B.C.) and Chephren and Mycerinus of this Ivth Dynasty who raised the vast piles of the great and the second and third pyramids at Gizeh. The Great Pyramid is 450 feet high and its sides are 700 feet long. It is calculated to weigh 4,883,000 tons. All this stone was lugged into place chiefly by human muscle. These unmeaning sepulchral piles of an almost incredible vastness, erected in an age when engineering science had scarcely begun, exhausted the resource of Egypt through three reigns, and left her wasted as if by war.
The story of Egypt from the Ivth to the XVth Dynasty is a story of conflicts between alternative capitals and competing religions, of separations into several kingdoms and reunions. It is, so to speak, an internal history. This is often called the Feudal Period. Here we can name only one of that long series of Pharaohs, Pepi II, who reigned ninety years, the longest reign in history, and left a great abundance of inscriptions and buildings. At last there happened to Egypt what happened so frequently to the civilizations of Mesopotamia. Egypt was conquered by nomadic Semites, who founded a "shepherd" dynasty, the Hyksos (XVth), which was finally expelled by native Egyptians. This invasion probably happened while the first Babylonian Empire which Hammurabi founded was flourishing, but the exact correspondences of dates between early Egypt and Babylonia are still very doubtful. Only after a long period of servitude did a popular uprising expel these foreigners again. Hatred of the foreigners had unified the spirit of Egypt.
After this war of liberation (circa 1600 B.C.) there followed a period of great prosperity in Egypt, the New Empire. Egypt became a great and united military state, and pushed her expeditions at last as far as the Euphrates, and so the age-long struggle between the Egyptian and Babylonian-Assyrian power began. Hitherto these two great systems had seemed too remote for war, but now man's powers of communication had reached a point when armies could march from one great river system to the other.
For a time Egypt was the ascendant power in this conflict. Thothmes III and Amenophis III (XVIIIth Dynasty) ruled from Ethiopia to the Euphrates in the fifteenth century B.C. For various reasons these two kings stand out with unusual distinctness in the Egyptian record. They were great builders, and left many monuments and inscriptions. Amenophis III founded Luxor, and added greatly to Karnak. At Tell-el-Amarna a mass of letters has been found, the royal correspondence with Babylonian and Hittite and other monarchs, including that Tushratta who took Nineveh, throwing a flood of light upon the political and social affairs of this particular age.
Thereafter there was a brief Syrian conquest of Egypt, a series of changing dynasties, among which we may note the XIXth, which included Rameses II, a great builder of temples, who reigned sixty-seven years (about 1317 to 1250 B.C.), and who is supposed by some to have been the Pharaoh of Moses, and the XXIInd, which included Shishak, who plundered Solomon's temple (circa 930 B.C.). An Ethiopian conqueror from the Upper Nile founded the XXVth Dynasty, which went down (670 B.C.) before the New Assyrian Empire created by Tiglath Pileser III, Sargon II, and Sennacherib. For the first time Babylonia lorded it over the Nile.
The days of any Egyptian predominance over foreign nations were drawing to an end. For a time under Psammeticus I of the XXVth Dynasty (664-600 B.C.) native rule was restored, and
Necho II recovered for a time the old Egyptian possessions in Syria up to the Euphrates while the Medes and Chaldeans were attacking Nineveh. From those gains Necho II, after the fall of Nineveh and the Assyrians, was routed out again by Nebuchadnezzar II, the great Chaldean king, the Nebuchadnezzar of the Bible. The Jews, who had been the allies of Necho II, were taken into captivity by Nebuchadnezzar to Babylon.
When, in the sixth century B.C., Chaldea fell to the Persians, Egypt followed suit. A rebellion later made Egypt independent once more for sixty years. In 332 B.C. she welcomed Alexander the Great as her conqueror, to be ruled thereafter by foreigners, first by Greeks, then by Romans, then in succession by Arabs, Turks, and British, until the independence of the present day. Such briefly is the history of Egypt from its beginnings; a history first of isolation and then of increasing entanglement with the affairs of other nations, as increasing facilities of communication drew the peoples of the world into closer and closer interaction.