Egypt is located in northeast Africa. It is flat with a few small hills, and is mainly desert. The average rainfall is only once every 100 years. Because of this, people lived along the Nile. By just using the soil that was there, Egyptians would get two crops per year, which was not very good. So they began an irrigation system, and then had five to six crops per year.
Because there was more food, there were more people to eat it. The food was eaten, and the people eventually ran out. So to get more food, Egyptians made more irrigation ditches. Soon there was more food, which then led to more people to eat it. There were now so many people that small villages were formed. The need for a central authority became more and more apparent.
Inundation was another reason Egyptians were able to farm. Every year the Nile floods. If it flooded 25 feet, it would be a good farming year. However, one foot more or less would cause problems; more would cause the villages to be washed out and less would cause starvation. The people in Upper Egypt had ways of knowing how high or low the flood would be. Again, there was a need for a central authority. Someone needed to see that Lower Egypt was told about the size of the flood in advance.
Who this central authority would be depended on where they were, and where they were was in isolation. To the east, there were the Sinai Desert and the Eastern Desert. To the south, there were cataracts and the Nubian Desert. To the west, there was the Lybian Desert. In the north there was yet another desert called the Mediterranean Sea. Travelling on the sea in an unsturdy boat was just as dangerous as travelling across a desert. Egyptians were completely isolated. They began thinking that because they had the Nile, surrounded by all that desert, and because they were not vulnerable to invasions, they therefore must live in heaven. That solved the "who's the central authority" problem. Who better to rule heaven than God?
So now the Egyptians had a god-king, or pharaoh. They also began thinking a certain way. Some good points about their thinking were they were optimistic, and were pragmatic. They believed it wasn't necessary to explain why something worked. As long as it worked, it didn't matter why or how. Because of this, there was no logic or theoretical science or mathematics. Their optimism, however grew out into the Old Kingdom and became very clear.
The Old Kingdom began in 3100 BC when King Menes united Upper and Lower Egypt. In this time, Egypt was very experimental and optimistic. The development of pyramids over time demonstrated the experimental side of Egypt. First people were buried in dirt mounds. But this proved to be inefficient because animals would dig up the bodies, and they couldn't bury their pharaoh, their god, like that. They began building mastabas, structures with a room for prayer and a burial chamber. Next was the step pyramid, which was like stacking up to 8 mastabas on top of each other, with each one smaller than the mastaba directly below it. They then decided to fill in the steps to make the surface smooth, which led to the true pyramids, such as those at Giza. Their optimism was evident through their tomb paintings. They were scenes of everyday farming, hunting, dining and dancing. They believed that their paintings were a representation of the afterlife.
It can be seen how the geography affected the thinking of the Egyptians, which then affected the beginnings of their history.
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Quick Commentary: the only reason i got such a low score on this one, and many of the others, is because those bastard 10th grade core teachers wanted the impossible, i mean i can only write by hand so fast, and like this essay, you only get an hour to spit out weeks worth of notes and lectures...it's a wonder any of us got out alive...