18. Egypt - Fall of the Pharaohs

Around 1200 AD, the medieval Arab traveler and scholar ABD Al Latif Al Bagdad set out from his hometown of Baghdad and set out on a journey of exploration as a young man. Albagdadi had studied law, medicine and philosophy and was inspired by the works of classical philosophers, particularly Aristotle. In the early 13th century, Al-Baghdadi embarked on a series of journeys that would take him to many of the great cities of the region. He traveled to Mosul, to Jerusalem, Damascus and Aleppo, and finally around the year 1204. His journey took him through the Sinai desert to the banks of the Nile on his travels Al Baghdadi wrote a book that was part travelogue and partly part philosophy titled The Book of Edification and Admonition in it he recalls the remarkable impression that Egypt made on him Egypt is a land of wonderful monuments and strange stories, it consists of a valley surrounded by two ranges of hills, one to the east and one to the west, the The Nile runs between them until it reaches Lower Egypt, where it divides into arms, all of which flow into the sea.

The Nile is unusual for its length. We do not know of any other river in the inhabited world that covers a greater distance. While Al Baghdadi traveled through Egypt He was impressed by the incredible variety of ancient remains. He saw great stone temples and tomb complexes crumbling beside the waters of the Nile, but none of them compared to the most legendary of all the monuments of Egypt that rose above the horizon, no. far from the city of Memphis, in a place called Giza. The ancient monuments in Egypt are like I have never seen or heard of.

In other lands, the first among them are the pyramids, they are very numerous, all are situated on the Giza side of the Nile and extend in the direction of Memphis, they extend over a distance of about two days' travel, some They are large, others small, some are made of clay and mud bricks but most are made of stone, some are stepped but most taper gently and of all these pyramids three stood out for their seemingly impossible immensity, returning to the pyramids of which they all speak, point out and characterize in terms of their great size. There are three arranged in a straight line at Giza, two of them are particularly enormous and it is with these two that poets have

fall

en in love.

The spectacle is so inspiring that your eyesight will fail as you try to take in everything in al-Baghdadi. He wrote accounts of the local people who lived near these vast remains. He describes some who climbed to the top of these structures and others who quarried them for their fine carved stone. Others still became obsessed with exploring the hidden tunnels and chambers that branched beneath the pyramids. In one of the Great Pyramids there is an open entrance that allows people entry and leads them to narrow hallways, labyrinthine passageways, shafts, shafts and other features. similar ones that appear in the stories of those who venture inside and explore the innermost parts of many people.

Obsessed by the pyramid and full of fanciful ideas about it, they are inspired to penetrate its depths but always end up somewhere beyond which they cannot go, they talked about how the pyramid was full of bats B and how these bats grow to the the size of doves there are inscriptions on the stones written in ancient characters that no one understands in all the land of Egypt. I have never found a single person who claims to have heard of someone who knew how to read them, even seems to have heard of someone who knew how to read them.

I visited the nearby Sphinx, which was later buried up to its neck in the sand also by the three pyramids, at a distance of little more than a bowshot, the image of a huge head and neck protruding from the ground, people call it old. The father fears and claims that his body is buried in the ground. His face is beautifully, in fact, admirably betrayed with a touch of elegance and beauty in the features, as if a smile passed through them. Above all, Al Baghdadi was impressed by his engineering mastery. have required to build such constructions and for them to survive for so long, the construction of the pyramids was carried out according to a remarkable methodology both in terms of design and precision of execution, this is what has allowed to the pyramids resist the passage of time. eras or rather it has meant that time itself has had to endure the era of the pyramids The noble intellects gave the pyramids their Pure Minds exhausted all their efforts for them The enlightened Souls poured their highest capacities into their design to set themselves up as examples who are the The pinnacle of the possible because of this, they almost speak out loud about their Builders telling us what kind of people were giving voice to their intellects telling the stories of their lives and times when Albagdadi visited Giza around the year 1200, it was built the Great Pyramid.

The tallest man-made structure in the world and had been so for more than 3,700 years during all that time, had testified to the greatness of the civilization that had grown on the banks of the Nile, a civilization that had passed through countless periods of flourishing and decline and finally disappeared under the sands of the desert. My name is Paul Cooper and you are listening to the Fall of Civilizations podcast every episode. I look at a civilization of the past that rose to glory and then collapsed into the ashes of History. I want to ask what they had in common, what led to their down

fall

, and what it felt like to be a person alive at the time who witnessed the end of his world in this episode.

I want to tell the story of one of the most iconic. cultures never produced by mankind the civilizations of Egypt's Nile Valley I want to show how this series of related societies grew on the floodplains of its Great River and built some of the most enduring and recognizable structures in the world I want to tell the story of how they emerged , how they resisted and how they finally disappeared from history, all together, the history of Egypt is one of the greatest and longest epics in all of history, many empires would consider themselves lucky to last the Reigns of 31 Kings, but ancient Egypt If we look at the reign of 31 dynasties of kings that lasted more than 3,000 years, since historians have long struggled with this panoply of rulers and eras and have tried to divide the history of Egypt into clear categories, they usually divide its history into three sets of dynasties commonly known as the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom, between these are a series of intervening periods in which the central power of their Kings failed and the land divided throughout this history.

The Empire of Egypt would grow and flow like the Great River that gave In life, that river was the largest watercourse in the entire landmass of Afrasia, the Nile River, the Nile finds its source in Lake Victoria, Lake Africa's largest, it is a body of water the size of the American state of Georgia or almost the size of Ireland. The gigantic Lake Victoria flows into the river known as the White Nile, which is joined by the so-called Blue Nile, downstream at Kum, the capital of Sudan, from there it flows for another 2,000 km through the deserts of Nubia and Egypt to El Cairo, where it forks into a wide delta and empties into the Mediterranean Sea next to the Amazon River.

The Nile is the longest or second longest river on Earth. It runs 6,800 km or about one-sixth of the way around the Earth and its drainage basin covers one-tenth of the entire land mass of Africa. Egypt itself has an extremely arid climate and its interior territories experience virtually no rainfall, if the geography would have been just a little different and the late Victoria would not have started draining westwards, we can only imagine how different history might have been. Gone for at least the last 5,000 years, every blade of grass and every tree in the Nile Valley, every animal and every person that has ever existed, every priest and every king owes its existence solely to this river.

The human presence in Egypt is among the oldest in the world. After evolving in the East African region, modern humans migrated primarily along this Corridor and from there spread to the rest of the world. The Nile is in a sense the highway that all of humanity once traveled as one of our first stops along our great journey. Egypt is home to human remains of astonishing antiquity. Stone tools worked by archaic humans have been discovered in Nile deposits dating back 600,000 years, and modern Homo sapiens followed in the last 100,000 years or so. These migrations probably occurred during one of the many African wet periods that have occurred over the past few million years.

These are times when changes in the planet's climate caused rain in the Sahara Desert. During these periods, the desert blossomed into a green grassland housing animals and people and when the period ended. The grasses would die, the animals would leave and the sands would return. It is believed that this cycle has occurred more than 200 times since the desert was formed 8 million years ago. The first people of this region lived by hunting and fishing and left behind tools of stone and a multitude of cave paintings from approximately 13,000 BC. C. in one of the driest periods in the history of the Sahara, the Silian culture began to collect wild wheat and barley and from there developed its own domesticated strain.

From 9,000 BC. C. people began to weave woolen and other wet threads. The period began with an enigmatic stone circle at the desert site of Nabta Pla dating to around 7500 BC. C., when the Sahara was a chain of rolling grasslands once again. This stone monument may have been used to mark the movements of the stars at different times of the year. That people could keep track of cycles such as harvesting and the migration of animals to hunt napapa has been called the Stonehenge of Egypt, but this does not do it justice, as it was built at least 5,000 years before the first ones were laid. stones from Stonehenge when the last ice age ended and the Sahara dried up once again.

Any people who had been living and appearing on their grasslands would have been driven from their ancestral home, would have wandered through the newly formed desert until they reached the only green strip in the middle of all that sand that was the banks of the Nile and here they would do home, these towns would build a collection of scattered settlements stretching up and down the river, but slowly as more and more people were driven to the river's edge to survive, these began to coalesce into larger towns, cities and finally kingdoms. The ancient Egyptians referred to the entire region by the name of the two lands which referred to the long Nile valley in the south and the delta that stretched in the north near the sea.

The two lands that we today call Upper and Lower Egypt Surprisingly for a modern person who orients his maps towards the north, the Egyptians thought that their world was in the opposite direction, as a consequence, their word for East was the same as their word for left and West. Just like in the Egyptian mind, they were always looking Up, waiting for the annual floods to come. If this is confusing as we continue, just remember that Southern Upper Egypt is the Upstream region and Northern Lower Egypt is Downstream for many people right now. The lands along the river bank would have constituted their entire world.

The Egyptians referred to the river's flood plain as chemet or the black earth because of the rich dark soil left by its life-giving floods. This land was the kingdom of the noble god Horus. who had the head of a falcon, the god of life, protection and healing, if you walked just an hour in any direction, you would soon reach what they called desr or the Red Land. water and shadow and inhospitable to most life these deserts were presided over by the god Set the god of chaos and violence the Nile itself was known simply by the name iteru or river since in their world there was no other the Egyptian world began in Upper Egypt, on the edge of the Nile, in a place now known as Aswan, here a belt of hard granite crosses the landscape and forces the river waters into shallow rapids that run over rocks and through rocky channels called cataracts .

This word comes from the Greek word cataractes. The waters of these falls have been tamed by the construction of the Aswan Dam, but in ancient times they could be a dizzying torrent. Each year when the flood waters passed over this rocky stretch of the river, they made a sound so thunderous that the Earth itself could shake and this led the ancient Egyptians to believe that the waters rose from beneath the Earth and gushed forth from vast underground seas. In Aswan they built a temple on an island in the middle of those rushing waters and here they worshiped that Primordial Force.

Aswan's swift waters made it a natural barrier for ships and prevented any further exploration upstream. For this reason, for much of its early history, this was where the influence of ancient Egyptit ended with the final extension of his power and the frontier of his empire. Beyond Aswan lay the southern lands of Nubia and for this reason the Egyptians would also refer to it as the narrow gateway to the south. The temple island at Aswan Falls was known to the Egyptians as Abu, the Egyptian word for elephant, as it was a center for the ivory trade. With these southern lands, the Greeks would follow this example and name the place Elephantine, from here the trade caravans would pass through southern lands to the Darur region of Sudan bringing gold, ivory and other goods, but north of Aswan everything was considered Egypt, as all Herodotus records.

All the land watered by the Nile in its course was Egypt and all those who lived below the elephantine city and drank the water of the river were Egyptians such was the Oracle that was given to them by lot for the Egyptians the Nile flows from the south to the north while the prevailing winds blow in the other direction, meaning you could use the winds to sail against the current to Aswan without too much effort, but the return journey would be even easier by allowing the river waters to simply carry you along. Along a ship heading downriver north from Aswan would for some time see only a rocky desert and the river blocked by cliffs of hard Nubian sandstone.

This is not very suitable land for agriculture, but in ancient times these valleys were sources of natural resources such as precious stones, copper and gold further north, the Red Cliffs fall and the flood plain around the river widens here the The landscape would have turned green and could support a larger population. It was in this region that the desert city of the Thieves that the Egyptians called Waset would grow. This would one day become the most powerful city in Upper Egypt, the capital of the desert regions, the living part of an Egyptian city, its houses, markets and workshops tended to be built on the eastern bank of the river, where the sun rises while the western bank where the sunset was used only for burials and tombs, sailing further north it would reach the area we call Middle Egypt and the flood plain becomes even broader, this region would have been teeming with wildlife and vegetation somewhere west of the river, the waters. divert and fill a large Oasis known as smoke which sprouts like a broad leaf from the stem of the Nile in ancient times this lake housed large populations of Nile crocodiles so the settlement on the shore would be known to the Greeks as crocodilopolis or City of Crocodiles Here, the Egyptians apparently even domesticated crocodiles in their temples, as Herodotus tells us.

Now, for some of the Egyptians, crocodiles are sacred animals, those who lived around the thieves and around the lake of Moses consider them more sacred and each of these two peoples maintains one. They select a crocodile that has been trained for tameness and put hanging stone and gold ornaments in their ears and bangles around their front legs and give them designated food and sacrificial victims and treat them as best as possible in other ways. places. Crocodiles were hunted for food using ingenious but risky methods. A man places the back of a pig on a hook as bait and lets it go to the middle of the river, while he himself on the river bank has a live young pig that he beats and the crocodile, hearing its cries, takes the direction of the sound and when he is dragged ashore, first of all, the hunter plasters his eyes with mud and, having done this, very easily gains mastery of him, but if he does not. doing so has many problems also to live in the river where the animals that the Greeks would call river horses or hippopotamus our hippopotamus the river horse is sacred in the districts of pemis but for the other

egypt

ians it is not sacred and this is the appearance that he presents, is a four-legged dress, with hooves like an ox, tied with a man like a horse and showing teeth like fangs with a tail and voice like a horse and in size as big as the largest ox and its skin is as extremely thick that when shars of javelins have been dried they make it the most strategically important place was what the Egyptians called the balance of the two lands this was the place where the river divided into its delta as a crossroads between the Upper and Lower Egypt this was always the natural place for the capital when the empire was united this place would give rise to the city of Memphis and in turn modern Cairo and it is here where the Egyptians would build their most famous and lasting monuments each year the rains monsoons that fall in the highlands. from Ethiopia and central Africa would swell the river and the annual flood would arrive.

This happened with such regularity in mid-August that the Egyptians calculated it using the rising of the star Sirius in the 5th century BC. C. Herodotus wrote the following description of these floods. When the Nile is flooded, it overflows in places up to 2 days' journey from either bank, the Nile comes with a rising flood for 100 days starting from the summer solers and when this story of days is completed, it sinks again with a decreasing current, so that the river is low throughout the winter until the summer solers again the Egyptian year was divided into three seasons the flood season of akat the growing season of peret and the harvest season of Shemu Once the flood waters receded in early autumn, the land was renewed and fertilized with rich Nile mud and new crops could be grown in this black mud.

Farmers grew Emma wheat, barley, beans and lentils during the colder winter season and when summer arrived, the grain was ready to be harvested. Egyptian life was kept in this delicate balance each time. year, if the river floods too little or too much, the results could be devastating, as an ancient Egyptian who reached the Nile makes clear, if he is greedy, the entire land suffers falls large and small, groaning, people change with his arrival, when he rises, then the earth. is in Joy then every belly is glad every jaw has laughed as their lives depended greatly on these floods the Egyptians developed ingenious systems to measure them at the Aswan Falls they built a series of devices known as nil omers which often take the form of towers with deep wells inside that allow the river to flow with measurements inscribed on their walls in Egyptian cubits each year, the ancients anxiously checked these nylers to see how high the water was rising that year and whether it would be a time of famine . a time of plenty or a time when they would need to hastily build some flood defenses.

During the period known as the predynastic era, the two halves of Egypt were divided and this division was cultural and political, the people of the southern desert of Upper Egypt. They worshiped their own God NE, who was commonly represented as a griffon vulture, a powerful and majestic bird. These people were probably darker skinned and had a closer cultural and linguistic connection to the lands of southern Nubia and sub-Saharan Africa. Their rulers sometimes even married royalty. of the southern kingdoms, meanwhile, the people of northern Lower Egypt paid deference to the god Waget, usually shown as an Egyptian cobra.

They had more genetic influence from North Africa and the Mediterranean and may have had somewhat lighter skin. The southern kings of Upper Egypt ruled wearing a white bulbous crown, while the northern kings wore a red crown with a spiral representation of a cobra emanating from it, the kingdoms ruling these regions were always fluid, but the distinction geographical between Upper and Lower Egypt always prevailed, but around the year 3000 B.C. or more than 5,000 years ago, all that began to change thanks to a king of a kingdom called Thinus, his name was nare, the figure of nare is shrouded in mystery and the little we know about him has been reconstructed from fragments of registrations. and some important artifacts nare was born under the personal name menes but he chose nare as his Horus name or King name when he came to the throne of Thinis and this name perhaps gives us an idea of ​​his personality because nare means something like fighting against the catfish.

The Nile catfish that the king admired is clearly a remarkable species, it is a predatory fish, a nocturnal hunter that can grow up to 1.2 m long or about the size of a dolphin and uses a form of naturally generated electricity as a weapon using a unique organ in its body can generate an electrical discharge of up to 350 vaults which stuns its prey (the largest catfish) this discharge can be enough to stun an adult human and the Egyptians were fascinated by this unique property and depicted these Shock and awe predators on a painted wall. murals and even experimented with using the weak electrical charges of young specimens as a treatment for arthritis, we could imagine that this Nare King wanted to emulate some of the characteristics of these Surprise Hunters, but if it was his patience in stalking his enemies the tenacity .

Of their surprise attacks or the shock and fear with which they stunned their prey, we may never know. Virtually the only source we have for this period is a carving known as the nare palette which contains only a handful of cryptic clues on one side of this carved artifact. shows King Nare standing over a defeated enemy, grabbing him by the hair in one hand and raising a mace in the other; here it is a clear sign of dominance. Nare is shown wearing the white bulbous crown of his native Upper Egypt, suggesting that he struck down his rivals there.

In submission on the other side, the carving shows the king leading an army while ranks of his defeated enemies lie before him. Below this is an image of a bull tearing down the walls of a fortress with its horns on this side of the carving. NAD is wearing the Red Crown of Lower Egypt, so we could assume that he undertook a campaign of conquest and managed to unite the two lands of Egypt. Two mythical animals carved into one side of the nare platform with their long necks intertwined, perhaps representing the union of the two sides of Egypt, their lives and destinies now inextricably linked, this was a union that would see the new United Egypt grow to become one of the most influential societies in early human history.

At first, Egyptian culture was heavily influenced by the slightly older civilizations of Mesopotamia, such as the Sumerians, Egyptian palaces were often built in Sumerian design and also used Sumerian motifs in their art, but at least by the year 3000 to. Egypt had matured its own indigenous artistic culture and its own writing system, the Greeks would. Later, we will refer to them with a word that means sacred carving or hieroglyph. Egyptian hieroglyphs are a mixed writing system that uses a variety of phonetic symbols, as well as a collection of symbols representing entire words, for example, an image of a man raising his hand. to his mouth could be used to represent the common word eat, but other symbols representing consonant clusters could be used to spell other less common words, names, or places.

Hieroglyphics emerged shortly after the invention of the CA form in Mesopotamia and it is possible that they were Inspired by this older writing system in Mesopotamia, we can see the gradual evolution of the writing system in CA form from its earliest symbolic roots, but in Egypt the oldest example of hieroglyphs discovered shows that the symbols came into existence already fully formed in a complex system, suggesting that they may have developed all at once as a conscious effort and perhaps were even devised by a single person. The Egyptian hieroglyph for ruler was the shepherd's crook, since the King was considered a kind of Shepherd to his people.

Egyptian kings even symbolized their royalty by holding a curved golden staff inspired by those used by shepherds and these kings have become known as

pharaohs

. The word pharaoh derives from the Egyptian word per which means great house and has remained in the popular imagination as the name used for any Egyptian. ruler partly due to its use in the Bible, but there is actually no evidence that it was used to refer to the rulers of Egypt until almost 2,000 years after Nar's lifetime, until that time during the first 18 dynasties of history of Egypt, its rulers were simply referred to as Kings or neset and with epithets such as your majesty, the term pharaoh has gained so much popularity and popular usage that it is still used to refer to all the rulers of Egypt throughout the centuries.

The pharaoh in ancient Egypt was considered the living embodiment of the Falcon. god Horus and the son of the sun god Rah a later hymn praises the figure of the king Pharaoh is the Lord of wisdom whose mother does not know his name the glory of the Pharaoh is in the sky his power is in the Horizon Pharaoh is the Bull of heaven who destroys everythingwill who lives from the being of each god perhaps the most famous of all Egyptians was forced by his religious beliefs to seize the bodies of the dead by ritually cleansing them in preparation for the afterlife, wrote the Greek Herodotus, who traveled widely in Egypt about The bers specialists who prepared bodies in this way in exchange for a fee, each time a corpse was delivered to them, showed those who brought it wooden models of corpses made real by painting and demonstrated on them the best forms of embalming the second they showed It is less good and also less expensive and the third is the least expensive of all.

Having told them this, they ask how they want their friend's corpse to be prepared with the price negotiation that the AMA could do. They begin their work, the grayish process that also Herodotus describes, first with the twisted iron tool, they extract the brain through the nostrils, extracting it partly in this way and partly by pouring drugs and after this, with a sharp stone from Ethiopia, they make a cut along from the side and they take out all the contents of the belly and when they have cleaned the cavity and cleansed it with palm wine, they clean it again with crushed spices, then they fill the belly with pure myrrh and with cassia and other spices and sew it up.

Once this is done, together they again keep it wrapped in Natron for 70 days and then wash the corpse and roll its entire body in fine linen cut into strips, smearing the underneath with chewing gum that the Egyptians generally use instead of glue. . Mummification was expensive and only those with wealth could afford it Wealthy merchants Royal officials and of course the Pharaoh himself An inscription on the walls of a tomb for the Pharaoh gives an idea of ​​the types of prayers and blessings that might have been said while carrying perform these rituals in this case to the son God Ammon ra and the son of the Moon God and take some with you so that he can eat what you eat, so that he can drink what you drink, so that he sits where you you sit, so that I can sail in what you sail in the cabin of some is covered with reeds the flood of some is in the swamp of offerings his party is among you Gods the water of some is wine like the sun some will circumnavigate the sky like the sun unus Co the sky Coming to the throne of the new king of United Egypt, Nare built a new capital perfectly located in the balance of the two lands.

Where the river met the Delta, this city would be known as Inbu Hedge or the city of the white wall, but today we know it as Memphis. The kings who followed Nar would rule from this new capital, but they spent much of their time traveling between palaces and, when they died, their bodies were still taken back to N's home region, Thinis, in Upper Egypt, to be mummified. and buried in the city's ancestral cemetery at Abydos, which was until the reign of a king called Hotep Sakm, who ruled approximately 2,900 BC. C. and began what has been called the second dynasty of Egypt and made the decision to start a new cemetery near Memphis so that the

pharaohs

of Egypt could be buried near their new To see this new cemetery, he chose a place in the west bank of the river, on the side where the sun sets, in a vast open place called Sakara.

Sakara is situated on a high plateau that the waters of the Nile cannot reach. Arriving visually would have been striking to ancient people as the place where the lands of the Green River end and the dead sand of the desert abruptly begins, for this reason it may have been considered a place of intersection between death and life, the perfect place to an acropolis or a city of the dead for kings who wanted their tombs to be remembered. It also had the advantage of being highly visible from the new capital of Memphis for centuries to come. This site would be filled with tombs of kings and queens and countless royal attendants and nobles.

Those who followed them to the Afterlife At first these tombs were built in a form known as Musta, large rectangular constructions built with mud bricks and which promised their inhabitants a rebirth in the next life. They could be very large, but they were still relatively modest, but they were soon Egyptian. The pharaohs would become even more ambitious with their burial arrangements. This ambition actually began with the rule of a pharaoh named Net Jerat Josa. The reign of Josa. The period known as the Old Kingdom begins, which would last for the next 500 years. Josa was the son of a king named K sakm who had reunited Egypt after a period of turmoil during which the Northern Delta rebelled with order now restored, Josa clearly wanted to keep it that way rather than continuing to travel the country as the pharaoh had done before him.

He moved to a permanent capital in Memphis where he could better survey the rest of the northern riverine lands. During his almost three decades of rule, he undertook an ambitious program of construction, rebuilding temples and erecting forts along the river, but it was in the manner of his burial that he would truly leave his mark when Joso began construction of his place. final resting place, it closely resembled the Masta tombs of kings that had existed before, but its royal architect soon began to dream of a more ambitious structure. Visionary chancellor and engineer who held numerous official titles in the Kingdom, including head of the royal shipyard.

Bearer of the royal seal and supervisor of all stone works. His name was imotep. The name otep means he who comes in peace. He was born in the 27th century BC, but beyond that, much of what we know about him has been distorted by myth and legend. He was something of a scholar, priest, statesman, scribe, doctor and architect, and even gained fame as a magician. He also has the distinction of being perhaps the first non-mage. Royal person who will be recorded in detail by history as the king's most trusted architect. Imotep was put in charge of building Joseph's tomb, but it would not be a normal mud brick Musta like his predecessors, in fact, Imotep was determined to build this tomb.

Of the stone, this stone would have to be quarried from the nearby bedrock, roughly cut into blocks, but since this Masta stone emerged from the desert, Imotep seems to have had an idea with this stronger building material, the structure could support more weight , so there was no real reason to stop building once the first Masta was built. He experimented with placing a smaller one on top and then another on top, creating a tiered design like a wedding cake. Originally, Imotep planned to build this construction for Te High, but it soon became even more daring when it was completed.

The Joso Tomb was six layers high, perhaps the world's first large-scale construction made of carved stone and rose to a height of 62 m, it was probably also the tallest building in the world, finally the Step Pyramid of Josa was complete and when the king died he was buried in a granite chamber beneath the great building surrounded by a labyrinth of tunnels. Joseph's Pyramid was a revolutionary step in Egyptian architecture and would represent a challenge to all kings who would follow it - a challenge they would find irresistible. The difficulties that engineers like Imotep faced in building these pyramids were enormous, but their achievement becomes even more impressive. considering that these monuments also had to be built quickly.

Today, Egypt is littered with the remains of half-built pyramids, these were abandoned halfway through their construction, generally because the pharaoh who commissioned them had died before his time. Once the pharaoh was dead, it seemed that no one saw any point in continuing to build his tomb, after all, there was now a new pharaoh and the construction of his pyramid would have to begin immediately, for this reason the py pyramids usually had to be completed by less in 30 years. Only the kings with the longest and most stable reigns would live to see the final cornerstone laid by the next pharaoh afterwards. josea was a man called seet who may have been Joseph's brother and would join the ranks of the unfinished as soon as he came to the throne he began construction of another step pyramid of immense ambition that would surely eclipse his brother's achievement, but only the The first layer of the pyramid was built when Sekmet died just six or S years into his reign and the pyramid was abandoned.

Another king Kabar also died after 6 years before his step pyramid could be completed. To build each pyramid, the Egyptians would need huge numbers of workers as there are up to 100,000 per pyramid and around 10,000 working at the same time. There is a widespread misconception that these monuments were built by slave armies, but most historians now believe this is not true. Slavery was an aspect of Egyptian society as it was throughout the ancient world. and slaves were mostly taken from prisoners of war and also from those who fell into debt or committed serious crimes, but slaves were mainly used as domestic servants or, if they were unlucky, worked in extractive industries such as mining and quarries, they were considered a lower class and have not been entrusted with the construction of such important and sacred buildings;

In fact, evidence shows that the pyramid builders were a mix of professional craftsmen and hardworking peasants who worked seasonally in exchange for rations. The life of an Egyptian farmer was dictated by comings and goings. from the annual floods and there were only a few times of the year when they could work meaningfully in the fields; the rest of the time they would have hired their services for construction projects, digging canals and other public works and building pyramids while working for the king these workers drank beer three times a day and ate meat regularly they worked in 3 month shifts and They were divided into teams of 20 men.

The discovery of their graffiti hidden on the inward-facing sides of some stone blocks in the pyramids shows that they gave each other playful and boisterous team names, some of which have been recorded by Kufu's friends. the vigorous gang the followers of the mighty white crown of kufu those who know the Pharaoh the drunken men Cory seems his supervisors fostered a sense of team pride and healthy competition, perhaps awarding honors and extra rations of beer to those who moved the greater number of blocks, no doubt the work was grueling, but over the next millennium, millions of Egyptians would accept this deal, perhaps also feeling a sense of pride in the great constructions.

They were participating in which, if all went well, they would live to see its completion. These workers were respected enough that anyone who died during construction was buried in tombs within the royal complex, their bodies forever separated from the monolith by which they had stood. given their lives. an honor that would never have been given to a slave the enormous administrative effort of building these tombs over the next few centuries required a fundamental restructuring of the Egyptian government in the past most of the senior positions of the state had been handed over to the pharaoh's family, but with such ambitious projects to be completed, trained people would be needed in the following decades.

Individual functions of government, such as those of master scribe and controller of workshops, were separated and these functions were delegated to capable people who were promoted on merit, the Egyptologist Toby. Wilkinson summarizes the transformation in the following terms when Egypt embarked on building pyramids the pyramids were being built Egypt this new group of public officials took pride in their work an Egyptian text from the fifth dynasty records the advice that a vizer called tar hotap gave him He told his son about how to be a successful administrator. Don't let your heart swell because of your knowledge.

Don't be overconfident because you are a wise man. Consult with the ignorant as well as with the wise. The good word is more hidden than the emerald, but it can be done. found even among the maids at the grindstone, the failures of the kings who followed Joseph must have left a mark on the morale of the Empire, their ruined half-finished pyramids standing in the desert like an image of royalty that could also be fragile and fleeting with its stepped pyramid. Josa had posed a provocation that would have to be answered, but it was not until the reign of a king called Snu that anyone rose to the challenge. snr's full name was horb maatu waj Horus The lord of matat has perfected me mat in Egyptian religion Belief was the embodiment of Justice and Truth, sometimes represented as a goddess wearing an ostrich feather on her head, who it kept the stars and the seasons in their regular patterns and kept the peace.

The opposite of it in her theology was the concept of isfet, chaos, darkness and disorder. Ed was sometimes depicted as a large coiled snake. For the most part, the snr name seems to havebeen appropriated under the protection of Maat. He reigned for 48 years, a time of prosperity and stability. His accession to the throne is remembered in later Egyptian. Source of the Papyrus of Haste, the Majesty of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt honei arrived at the place of death and the Majesty of the king of Upper and Lower Egypt snefru was erected as a beneficent King throughout this land during his half century on the throne snu would secure his place as Egypt's most ardent and determined pyramid builder, faced with the failure of The Last Kings to build a step pyramid to match Joseas snfu began to wonder if he could build something even better, a pyramid that would fit a perfect geometry.

He had a vision of a pyramid with smooth, polished sides, unlike anything the world had seen before. His first attempt to achieve this would be in the Pyramid of May Doom. There is some debate as to whether the Maom pyramid was built by Snefru or his predecessor. honi, but we can assume that they would not compete for the honor, since it is one of the most impressive failed pyramids in history. The Maom pyramid was built in several stages, first it was a stepped pyramid of similar design to that of Joseph and then this interior structure. It was encased in a steep shell of white limestone creating a high and narrow point, the effect would have been beautiful until one day, when the pyramid was nearing completion, when the full weight of the stone began to collapse in all directions, We can only imagine the noise and calamity that must have accompanied this.

The workers jumping away from the rubble. The supervisors watching a gas as an avalanche of carefully carved stone fell from the side of the pyramid. The moment this happened, he ordered the work to stop. Construction workers inside the inner chambers simply left their tools and walked away. Today, the burial chamber inside the pyramid is still unfinished, with raw uncarved walls and wooden supports still in place, which were usually removed after the snu construction had been devastated, but it was not soon discouraged. , tried again with a pyramid at the site of dashur, just south of the royal necropolis of Sakara, this pyramid was intended to be tall and its sides were even steeper than the first.

His workers began to build it with a steep slope on its sides and this time snu. He must have hoped to obtain the pyramid he dreamed of, but this did not turn out to be the case. This second pyramid was built on land that was just soft sand and shale as the pyramid took shape and its weight rose to millions of tons. They found that the stone was sinking into the ground and causing cracks to appear in the structure. We can only imagine how it felt to be the architect who had to bring this bad news to the king the son of Rah the living incarnation of the god Horus.

The workers tried everything they could, from adding new support blocks to the base to propping up the sinking sections with huge cedar wood beams, but to no avail, it became clear that if they continued with the pyramid as planned, it would likely collapse. just as the first one had done. Pharaoh Shu seems to have listened to reason and agreed to allow his workers to hastily finish the pyramid with a reduced angle of only 43° and a final height reduced by 25 m. This means that today the pyramid has a peculiar flat appearance which was given the name of the bent pyramid, it is clear that snfu was still not satisfied, he now ordered the construction of a final pyramid 1 km to the north combining everything his craftsmen had learned Of the first two, this one was now built with an angle of 43°.

He leaned more evenly from the beginning, distributed the weight over the earth and finally Snefru obtained the pyramid he wanted. This was the first structure to truly take on the iconic shape of an Egyptian pyramid and would be used as a model for those to be built. In the years to come it was 105 M tall, almost double the height of Joseph's Pyramid and the new tallest building in the world and its geometric perfection was undeniable when Snefru died, he was buried in this pyramid according to his wishes and his son took the throne that would be.

The greatest pyramid builder of all His name was Kufu When he was a child Kufu must have seen his father snu obsessed with building the three pyramids of him. We can imagine the young prince listening to his father's conversations with his architect, tension and anger like the first. two pyramids failed and then the final Triumph of the Red Pyramid and perhaps as a child he dreamed of one day building such a monument for himself, we know very little about the kufu or what his reign was like, but it is clear that he was inspired by a stuff. size and, above all, the desire to build the largest pyramid that has ever existed, learning from his father's mistakes in the bent pyramid and probably inheriting some of his architects.

Kufu chose to build his tomb about 15 km northwest of Sakara on a platform of strong limestone on the outskirts of Memphis, at a place called Giza, when construction of the Great Pyramid began there must have been some uncertainty as to whether it would be possible for it to be would be built using approximately 2.3 million large stone blocks weighing a total of 6 million tons and when it would be built. The first layer was completed, it was the size of more than 10 football fields. Its builders predominantly used local limestone quarried from the vicinity of the Giza Plateau to build the inner structure of the pyramid and these were joined together with lime mortar filled with straw and charcoal, fortunately these organic remains.

The pyramid's mortar can be carbon dated, allowing archaeologists to date the pyramids with scientific certainty to this period, but while the rough stone would be needed for the main body, the king's burial chamber at its heart It was made of hard granite blocks brought from Aswan, as it was necessary. To resist the crushing weight of millions of tons of stone on top, the thin limestone blocks of its outer layer were quarried at a place called Tura on the other side of the river. The stone from these quarries was of exceptional quality, a pale white color almost like marble, for this reason it was highly valued for use inside tombs and was the perfect casing for a pyramid.

This limestone was extracted from underground tunnels in these quarries and dragged to the banks of the Nile, where it was loaded onto barges to be transported downriver. To facilitate the transportation of these stones, the Egyptians dug a series of canals and artificial ports that reached to the base of the pyramids, one of which was known as Shake kufu or the kufu pond. A papyrus has been discovered. The oldest ever found is the work diary of a supervisor named Marer. In it he records the process of this perhaps less stimulating task. On the 25th, Inspector Marer spends the day hauling stones in the South of the Torah.

He spends the night on the 26th. the Torah inspector morer discards tah loaded with stones spends the night in the pond of kufu day 27 sits loaded with stones spends the night in the pyramid day 28 sets sail from the pyramid in the morning sails upriver towards tah South day 29 Inspector Morer spends the day carrying stones in t The South spends the night in the Torah on the 30th Inspector Mora spends the day carrying stones in the Torah The South spends the night in the Torah Surprisingly, the pyramid was perfectly oriented towards True North with one of its faces at each point of the compass suggesting that the Egyptians must have used measurements of the stars to align it, the only OWN method by which they could have achieved such precision and with the now exceptional organization of the Kingdom, it is estimated that only It took around 23 years to build and the final Stones were laid around the year 2560.

BC, upon completion, the Great Pyramid of Giza would be 147 m tall or almost 40 stories; It was the tallest man-made structure in the world and would remain so for almost 4,000 years; the building that finally surpassed it: the wooden spire of Lincoln Cathedral in England, completed in 1311, stood for just over two centuries before collapsing in a storm. Today, Kufu has cemented his name in history with the construction of these monuments, but apart from his ambitious pyramid, little else is known about him, the only representation of him. What is found is a single figurine carved from ivory and, ironically, for a man so obsessed with large scales, this statue was only 7cm or less than 3cm high when Kufu died around 2525 BC.

C., his son Jedra would take the throne, but his reign was short and when another of Kufu's sons died, he became pharaoh. His name was Caffra. Pharaoh Caffra would follow in the footsteps of his father and grandfather and build his own great pyramid. He would place it right next to his father's but for some reason he refused to build it higher. It could be that his builders, perhaps tired of this mania for ever bigger and better pyramids, simply told him that it would not be possible. To build anything larger, Caffra may have been concerned that it would have seemed unseemly to equal his dead father. so ostentatiously perhaps for this reason caprr's pyramid would be a differential 3 and A2 M shorter than his father's, although he made sure to place it on a slightly higher shelf of light limestone, meaning that from many angles it looks taller along with slightly steeper angled sides.

It meant that Caffra was also able to build his pyramid with perhaps 350,000 fewer stone blocks, a saving that his teams of workers and stonemasons no doubt appreciated today. The Cfre Pyramid is the only pyramid in Giza that retains any of its original smooth white tah stones. Limestone that still clings to the top third of the structure, perhaps because its steeper sides made it more difficult for stone thieves to extract the top of its masonry, allowing us to imagine what these monuments would have looked like in their Age. Gold, white and smooth sides. which must have shone blindingly under the desert sun and in the night Sha in the light of the Moon, these pyramids were probably also covered with a stone known as pyramidion, usually carved from diorite or granite and carved with hieroglyphics.

Some examples of these pyramidions have been found. with distinctive grooves suggesting they were encased in a decorative metal, either copper or shiny electro, an alloy of gold and silver, as the pyramidion from the pyramids of Giza has never been found. It is unknown if their upper parts were encased in metal, but they were. would have made them an even more impressive sight: a glittering Pinnacle rising into the heavens approximately 100 years after the construction of Joseph's first steep pyramid, all of Egypt's largest pyramids had already been built by just three generations of the same family. but almost from the moment the last cornerstone was laid on the massive CFR monument, enthusiasm for the massive pyramids began in Wayne, Pharaoh Mena, son of Caffra and grandson of Kufu, also built his pyramid at Giza around the 2510 BC C., but theirs would be significantly smaller, not even a tenth the size of the Great Pyramid and only 2/3 the size of even Joseph's step pyramid.

One explanation for this was that Mena did not expect to live long enough to build a construction as grand as that of his predecessors Herodotus records in a tradition. about Pharaoh Mena who relates how an oracle told him that his reign would be short, so he decided to take advantage of the time he had and perhaps this left him little time for the construction of the pyramid, the king considered this unfair and sent back to the Oracle a message of reproach blaming God why he must die so soon while his father and uncle had lived long he had many lamps made and he lit them at dusk and drank and brightened the day or the night, it never ceased since wander through the rings to the swampy region and the groves and every time he heard about the most likely places of pleasure, whether there is some truth in this or not, it is clear that Mena had different priorities than kufu and cfre and their pyramid The arrows would continue to build pyramidal tombs, but they would mostly be on a much smaller scale and would cut larger and larger corners in their construction instead of a solid limestone structure.

These later monuments would often be a simple shell of limestone covering a core of mud bricks or simply earth and sand, for this reason few remains of these later pyramids remain, apart from the melancholy piles alone in the desert, slowly the practice would begin to die out completely, the reason the Egyptians stopped building pyramids was partly due to changes in religious attitudes towards burial, but it also seems to have arisen from concern about tomb robbers, after all, A pyramid was essentially a huge sign announcing to the worldthat the richest man in Egypt was buried there from the first days when people were attracted to it. the tombs of long-dead kings to try to steal their treasures.

The inscription on a tomb of a royal architect called ineni gives us a clue to these changing priorities. He writes that he built the tomb of his king not in an ostentatious declaration of power but in total secrecy and under supervision. the excavation of His Majesty's cliff tomb alone no one saw no one heard even in these secret tombs tomb robbers remained a constant concern a pharaoh of the later New Kingdom would order an inspection of the tombs of his predecessors and his inspectors would return In disturbing news from the King's Tomb it was discovered that miscreants had damaged it by forcing an opening into the main chamber of his tomb through the passage wall of the sanctuary of Neberman Superintendent of the King's Grain Stores at Ferary Place The king's body had been removed and the tomb of his royal wife, the Royal Lady of Numbas, was empty, thieves had laid violent hands on them, it was not just the precious treasures inside that were stolen, as the supervisor marer had discovered by cutting the limestone blocks.

Quarrying at Tora was one of the most time-consuming parts of construction, for this reason pharaohs, who felt more pressed for time, sometimes stripped previous pyramids of their carved stone to speed up their own monuments. A Middle Kingdom text known as the Maricare Instruction advises kings against this shameful practice. Do not loot another's monument, but do not loot the quarry stone monument. Nura. Do not build your tomb from ruins using what has been made for what will be made instead of building your own pyramids in Sakara or Giza. The pharaohs would be buried in a place near the thieves that the Egyptians called The Great and Majestic Necropolis of the Millions of Years of the Pharaoh or sometimes the great field but today it is known as the Valley of the Kings here a natural rock formation known as elur. or the horn towers over a series of spectacular Red Cliffs when viewed from the entrance to the tombs.

Here this pointed peak looks a bit like a natural pyramid. This convenient form of terrain may have relieved some of the pressure on the pharaohs of each Egypt and allowed them an equally prestigious place to be buried while freeing up an untold amount of energy and manpower in the Kingdom. Egypt's manual workers could perhaps breathe a sigh of relief. Little by little, the age of the pyramids came to an end, but there was still a long time in the future and throughout the world. During the 4th and 5th dynasties of Egypt, construction of the Royal Monument continued confidently, but in the 6th Dynasty, around the 23rd century BC.

C., construction began to decline. Part of the reason for this was a growing decentralization of the Empire and a gradual weakening of the king's power. The last pharaoh of the Old Kingdom was called Pepe II. He came to the throne at the age of six and ruled for more than 60 years. Pepe was an excitable and enthusiastic child, as we can see in the inscription on a tomb of one of his officials named Huf Huf. He had a long and illustrious career, serving as mayor of one of Egypt's southern provinces in the Nile Cataract region of Aswan, the narrow gate to the south, the highlights of his life were the four voyages of exploration he Undertook in the name of his Pharaoh followed the Nile to the heart of central Africa, towards what the Egyptians called the lands of the Horizon, he wrote a complete account of one of these Expeditions on the walls of his tomb.

I achieved it in 7 months. I brought all kinds of beautiful exotic products from there and was highly praised for it. I returned with 300 donkeys loaded with incense, ebony, precious oil, leopard skins and elephant tusks. The boy Pharaoh Peepe was so delighted by Hu's trip that he wrote him a letter directly. The letter was probably written. on a fragile papyrus and has not survived, but fortunately he was so proud of this sign of royal favor that he copied the letter word for word on the wall of his tomb. His proudest moment was etched in stone for eternity.

In it we get a sense of the voice of this excitable young king you know how to do what your lord loves and favors you wake up and sleep planning to do what your lord loves favors and commands unique friend Haku Pepe was especially excited by a small man with the that Haku had crossed paths. East Africa and he had brought with him perhaps a man with dwarfism or a member of the so-called pygmy tribes of central Africa. Furthermore, in this message he has said that he has brought a dwarf of the God Dances from the land of the Horizon.

The inhabitants come downriver to the Residence at once, hurry and bring with you this dwarf that you have brought alive, prosperous and healthy for the King when he goes down with you to the boat, have excellent people around him on the deck so that he does not fall into the water , my Majesty. he wishes to see this particular dwarf more than the produce of the lands; However, as pharaoh, Pepe was relatively ineffective during his childhood, his mother and Grand Viers seem to have done much of the ruling, and as an adult he continued a relatively hands-off approach to the kingdom for much of its history, Egypt had been governed by regional governments.administrators known as nomarchs who were appointed by the pharaoh to govern their regions on his behalf.

During Pepe's long reign, an increasing amount of power passed to these regional governors, gradually their positions became hereditary rather than appointed, so that individual families began to accumulate large amounts. of power and their tombs became larger and more elaborate with each passing year, these nomarchs soon began to look a lot like feudal lords or even petty kings and even began to fight among themselves, while King Pepe, who was once a child, now entering his 70s, frail and increasingly frail. separated from the task of ruling, this might not have been a fatal blow to the kingdom, but it was around this time that a record drought descended on Egypt and the entire eastern Mediterranean beginning in 20200 BC, this climate change that we have found before it is Known as the 4.2 kiloyear event and has been implicated in the collapse of the Cardian Empire BC in Mesopotamia and perhaps even the Indus Valley Civilization in India and Pakistan in Egypt.

The result of this event was a series of years in which the Nile floods were much more intense. The drought eased and agriculture came under immense pressure. The drought was so severe and long-lasting that Lake Verdant in Fum, once 65M deep, completely dried up over the next 50 years and crop yields would have plummeted. The long reign of a pharaoh was generally good. news for the kingdom, tended to create a period of stability and often prosperity, but when a king's rule lasted too long, it tended to create what we might call the Old King problem, the long reign of Pharaoh Pepe alongside with his multiple wives.

It meant that he had countless children, many of them now elderly with children and grandchildren of their own, and they were all impatient to see this Old King die so that they would have the opportunity to rule when Pepe finally died around 217 5 BC. What followed was a succession crisis of immense proportions, chaos. The Serpent of Isfet now made its way around all the lands of Egypt. Over the next two decades, the kingdom would see no fewer than 17 pharaohs come and go, some perhaps dying of old age and some not. Undoubtedly murdered by his rivals, the only one of these kings who survived more than a year on the throne was a man called Iby, who even, with some optimism, attempted to build a pyramid in the royal cemetery of Sakada, but this monument was A testament to the now greatly reduced status of the empire, it rose to just over 30m high, was smaller than the pyramids of some of the previous king's wives, and was also lazily built around a core of mud and limestone chips.

King Iby, the man who was to be buried under this sad monument, ruled only for 2 years, a month and a day and probably did not control all of Egypt. Now the local governors of Nar declared their independence and ruled their provinces alone. Their tombs at this time stopped referring to the reign of a pharaoh. and they are full of boasts and elaborate titles that seem to have been invented by themselves An inscription on the tomb of a powerful Nomar called atifi demonstrates how the centralized power of the King was declining I am the vanguard of men the rearguard of men a leader of the land through strong active behavior in speech collected in thought because I am without a Peer who spoke when the people were silent in the day of fear when Upper Egypt was silent antii remember the time of famine that devastated the land while crisis After crisis shook In the ancient and struggling Old Kingdom, all of Upper Egypt was dying of hunger to the point that everyone had come to eat their children, but I managed to ensure that no one died of hunger in this province, the entire country had become a hungry grasshopper with people going north and south in search of grain Egypt was now fracturing into something resembling the shape it had had before King Nare merged it into a stable centralized state nearly 800 years before.

As refugees flooded the roads, another later Egyptian writer called uer who lived in the period after this chaos describes people resorting to theft to survive and violence spreads. The Guardians of the house say: let's go steal the bird traps. They formed armed bands. The farmers of the Delta have provided themselves with shields. A man looks. his son as his enemy the evildoer is everywhere the flood of the Nile comes but no one goes out to plow uer describes a widespread economic collapse during which trade from foreign lands exhausted the skilled freemasons who built pyramids, now work on farms and those who guarded the ship of the gods are united in the yolk of the men who plow do not go on a journey today what will we do for Cedarwood for our mummies in coffins in which the priests are buried and with the oil in which the men are embedded they no longer come everything in Ruins laughter is dead if I knew where God was I would make offerings throughout this period of about 200 years some must have at least dreamed of a better time waiting for them in the future another text written after this known time as Neferti's prophecy contains a prediction that a ruler would come who would end this time of strife, a king will come, take the white crown, wear the red crown, unite the two powerful lands.

Rejoice, people of your time, the Asians will fall. to his sword and the Libyans will fall before his flame the rebels belong to his wrath and the traitors at heart belong to him not the man who would fulfill this prophecy or rather the man in whose Reign the prophecy was most likely to be written would meet Egypt and the beginning of a new era of stability his name was nebbe petre menu hotap II menu hotap was a king in the city of thieves in Upper Egypt sitting on the eastern bank of the Nile about 800 km from the Mediterranean the thieves is one of the sunniest and driest cities in the world, it had been the capital of its own province throughout the Old Kingdom, but had always been something of a backwater and somewhat influenced by the African culture of Nubia, but during more than a century of chaos that surrounded the Collapse of the Old Kingdom The thieves slowly grew to become the capital of the South and its kings began to refer to themselves as the great Overlord of Upper Egypt.

It was a city where tight rows of houses, granaries and workshops were grouped around the central Temple dedicated to the god. Amun and his people were clearly seeking a break from the king's stifling influence in Memphis, but in the north, near the traditional center of Egyptian power, an ambitious and ruthless rival was also amassing its forces, centered around the city of Henen. nut in Lower Egypt. In the green region between the Nile River and the Great Lake at Fum, a region that the desert Thebans disdainfully called the Marshlands, this city would later be known as Heracleopolis or the City of Hercules for approximately 100 years during this time of dissolution of the thieves. and henen nut had fought bitter wars in small border regions, forts and roads, but neither side could gain the upper hand until the reign of the King of Thieves menu hotap was named after the Thean god of war and came from a lion of Warrior Kings clearly wished to bring this series of conflicts to a decisive conclusion and reunite the fractured Kingdom of old.

The final confrontation between North and South would be sparked by a rebellion in the city of Thinis, once the home of King Namare and now one. of the thieves' vassals, delighted with this development, the northern power of hanen nut seized the opportunity and marched south towardsthe desert to capture the city. The war soon spread throughout Egypt, at one point the northerners advanced south and captured the ancient Holy City of Abydos and there a wave of destruction was unleashed against its temples and palaces. A later text known as the Instruction to Maricard purports to be written by a king of Northern Henen Nut who is wracked with guilt over the destruction of this Holy City.

A shameful event occurred in my The moment th province was devastated, although it happened thanks to my actions, I learned after it was done, there was a richer contribution for what I had done. It is bad to destroy, be careful with it. A hit is paid for its similar to every action there is. An answer, this answer would come in the form of a thunderous retaliation from the King of Thieves' men. He would march north and defeat the armies of Henen Nut. He then surrounded the Northern Capital when he captured all the Ferary monuments. of his kings were defaced and destroyed, perhaps suggesting a sack of the city.

Whatever the northerners had done to the sacred center of Abydos, it was clearly visited upon them and their city with the double hotep menu now spread across northern Egypt and provincial governors saw the writing in The period that followed, known as The Middle King's Kingdom of Egypt would last around 300 years, but has not left an impressive archaeological record in comparison. Compared to the towering pyramids of the Old Kingdom and the architectural magnificence of the later New Kingdom, it stands out as a dull era for the construction of great monuments, but it experienced a flourishing in another area which is the realm of Egyptian literature, a famous story.

Written at this time it is called the story of Sinu and tells the life of a man who traveled to northern Palestine and beyond, but who eventually becomes homesick and decides to return to Egypt. Another collection of stories was written at this time about a species of ancient Arabian knights. Known as the Tales of Wonders, it relates a series of fantastic stories imagining that they were told to the great Pharaoh Kufu of the Old Kingdom by his three sons. Another story written during the Middle Kingdom is known as the Tale of the Shipwrecked Mariner, a kind of Guliver's Ancient Voyages notable for their innovative structure.

A tale within a tale about a sailor who is shipwrecked in the Mediterranean and finds himself on an island ruled by a gigantic snake. A storm swept us out into the open sea and we had no chance of getting there. In the harbor the wind got stronger and made a constant moan and there were hungry waves 14 feet high, a piece of wood of some kind hit me and then the ship died of all those good men none survived and then I They took them to a desert island. By a wave of the great green sea, the man talks to the Great Serpent who tells him a sad story of his own that his entire family died when a star fell to Earth.

The serpent tells the man not to fear that eventually a ship will pass through the sea. island and rescue him and assures him that soon he will have a great story to tell now you are going to spend a month and then another until you finish four months on this island then a ship will come from Egypt with sailors on it who you know you can go home with them and to die in your own city, what a joy for those who live to tell the things they have been through when the suffering ends, the planned ship finally arrives and the man is rescued, the ship finally arrived.

Just as he had predicted, I climbed a tall tree and recognized the sailors on the ship and ran to report it, then I went down to the shore near where the ship was, greeted the crew and thanked the Lord by the sea. from the hallway. and those on board did the same, we have examples of myths and legends written before this time and religious texts, but this is not the story of some past king or the actions of the gods, it is a story about an ordinary man in a fantastic situation told seemingly simply. for the entertainment value of telling a story and for that reason it is possibly the first true piece of literature, it was probably written around 1900 BC.

C. and, therefore, it is almost 4,000 years old. The lives of the Phos of Egypt occupy much of the usual discussion. of its history partly because it was they who commissioned the inscriptions Monuments and statues, but as the flowering of literature in the Middle Kingdom continued, we increasingly have an idea of ​​what life was like for ordinary people in the Middle Kingdom. Nile Valley. The period known as the Lance Papyrus offers a fascinating insight into the lives of the common people of Egypt. It is written as a piece of rhetoric by a scribe teacher to one of his students who is trying to convince him to become a scribe and from this we get a wonderful impression of all the ways people could make a living in the land of Egypt.

Young man who writes to someone who knows that it is more profitable than any profession, it is more pleasant than bread and beer, than clothes than oil, yes, it is more precious than an inheritance. In Egypt, look for a tomb in the west with your own eyes. Here all the professions are before you. The washerman spends the whole day raising and lowering each limb. He is tired, bleaching his neighbors' clothes every day. The potter is smeared with clay. like a man in mourning his hands and feet are full of mud he is like someone who lives in the swamp the shoemaker mixes tanning lotions his smell is marked his hands are red with dye like someone who is stained with his blood the florist makes bouquets and beautifies the wine jars.

He spends a night at work sweating like someone whose body the sun shines on. The traders are far down the river and up the river and are as busy as they can carrying grass from one town to another and supplying that. Don't you know, if you have any sense, being a scribe? Whether daily life was really that bad for all these other workers, we can't say because of course none of them wrote how they felt that most Egyptians were peasants and even when they practiced these other professions, they probably also engaged in farming. agriculture. These peasants did not own the land they worked and had to give most of the food they produced to the crown or their local temple to supplement their diets.

Most houses had a private kitchen. Also the gardens that the women tended while the men went out to the fields. Egyptian women were also responsible for baking the bread they ate every day. Bread in Egypt was mainly made from Emma wheat dough. They were often pressed into clay molds and baked and sometimes people would get creative by baking bread in spirals like a cinnamon swirl and using shaped molds to baking breads in the shape of animals, those who could afford them also baked cakes and pastries with the best flour sweetened with dates and honey along with the bread The Egyptians ate a varied diet that included garlic and chives, lettuce, celery, cucumbers, pumpkins and melons .

They supplemented them with protein-rich beans and legumes, such as lentils and chickpeas, and a species of edible tuba known as tiger nuts that grows at the base of wetland reeds, all of which were cooked in olive oil at least from the time they were made. They built the pyramids, sometimes they also ate meat, mainly beef, lamb, pork and goat, as well as quail, pigeons, ducks, geese and partridges, mice were sometimes even eaten and even hedgehogs, the Egyptians cooked these spiky creatures wrapping them in wet clay and baking them in it and when the clay opened later, it took away the hedgehog's spines.

The Egyptians also made cheese and it was even made by force-feeding geese. written by a scribe to queen nefer tari urges people to share with others the food they have not to eat bread while another stands still without extending his hand as for food it is always here it is the man who does not last a man one is rich, another is poor, but there is food left for those who share it, as beer was exceptionally popular in Egypt and people consumed it daily, as a result, breweries were important centers of the industry. Beer was thought to have been given to Egypt by the goddess Hathor, the goddess of beauty. music, dancing and breweries were watched over by the goddess tenonet, so many breweries were run by women, some of them were huge and were capable of producing more than a million liters a year, they used large vats of ceramics supported on mud bricks.

Fires sputtered and within these they heated barley and water, then let the mixture ferment before flavoring The Brew with honey and syrups made from dates and other fruits. There was even an Annual Festival called the Technological Festival which would become known as the Festival of Drunkenness during In this Festival the Egyptians drank as much beer as they could and then fell asleep together in a large hall and were then woken up all together by the loud sound of drums. . It was said that at the moment just after waking up some of them would meet the goddess.

Hathor Egypt itself was one of the most stable and prosperous agricultural societies in the ancient world, but it was a society built entirely on the gathering and storage of grain, as a result, there was an ever-present danger: the presence of mice and rats. in large circular granaries inside the cities shaped like beehives and the freshly harvested wheat or barley was poured through a hole in the top to preserve it in the hot, dry air when grain was needed to make bread or beer, it was took from a small door. at the bottom of these barns, but if mice were to get into this warehouse or even eat the grain while it was still in the fields, then thousands of hours of work could be wasted and people could even starve, but fortunately the Egyptians they were able to rely on a particular set.

Of the domestic cat's allies, there were two main breeds of wild cats native to Egypt, the jungle cat or Felis chaus and the African wild cat Felis sylvestris Lia. Of these, the African wild cat had something of a Karma temperament and was therefore most often bred. As a pet with evidence of their domestication in Egypt for at least 5,000 years, these cats were kept in Egyptian settlements for their obvious usefulness both in controlling mice and for their almost supernatural reflexes due to their ability to kill poisonous snakes, but it is clear that The Egyptians also enjoyed their company and even loved them.

Some particularly beloved pets were buried with small offerings intended to serve them well in the afterlife. Greek writers from Sicily remember seeing Egyptians perform burial ceremonies for their cats. When one of these animals dies, they wrap it up. in fine linen and then crying and beating themselves eating their breasts they carry it to embed it and after having treated it with cedar oil and similar spices they have the quality of imparting a pleasant smell and of preserving the body for a long time they keep it. in a consecrated tomb, while the earliest domestication of the domestic cat took place elsewhere in the Fertile Crescent, it was in Egypt where it accelerated dramatically as cats became accustomed to their new survival niche, they in turn began to adapt, they largely lost their original camouflage. smaller and even developed new ways of signaling their human patterns with soft, insistent cries modulated at frequencies similar to those of a human baby, appropriately the Egyptian word for cat was Mew.

Over time, this adoration of their feline companions appears to have also developed into a religious reverence with their Ease and Grace cats in Egypt were associated with femininity and tomb paintings often show the domestic dog sitting under the chair. a man while a cat sits under the woman's chair. A goddess called Bastet would soon be worshiped and manifested as a woman with the head of a domestic cat, bastet, became a god of fertility and women appealed to her during periods of childbirth and pregnancy. Diodorus later records seeing an Egyptian festival during which cats were ritually fed to the cats, breaking bread into milk, and calling to them with a clucking sound.

They place it in front of them or cut the fish caught in the knife and feed them the meat. They roar, everyone who encounters these animals prostrates themselves before them and honors them. The Egyptians were also fiercely protective of their feline companions, as Diodorus Who Kills relates. A cat, whether intentionally or not, is certainly executed by common people. Gathering crowds and dealing with the perpetrator is very cruel, sometimes doing this without waiting for a trial, the cult and veneration of cats would continue throughout the thousands of years of ancient Egyptian history. and for cats it is perhaps something they have never completely forgotten.

The Middle Kingdom was not just a time of entertainment and pleasure, with the mania for pyramid building somewhat subsiding, certain pharaohs became involved in large-scale construction projects to strengthen and develop the Empire. The king passedMuch of his life on a vast irrigation project around the Oasis at Fum, determined to turn it into a productive site of farmland, another built a large series of defensive walls in the Nile delta, separating Egypt from the peoples of the Middle Eastern people, whom the Egyptians called Asians, were often depicted in their paintings as having lighter, yellower skin than the Egyptians and were generally despised as uncivilized barbarians.

The Egyptians soon began to push their sphere of influence into this area expanding their territory northward along the Mediterranean coast and into Palestine. They crossed the Sinai Desert and subjugated the Phoenician city of Byblos, then turned their attention to southern Africa. Eastern, what the Egyptians called The Horizon, lands in the lands of the Nubians as the light-skinned Asians in the north, the Egyptians considered the southern Nubians. different from them and usually depicted with darker skin than the Egyptians and more typically African features. At this time these kingdoms were relatively underdeveloped and were easy prey for an aggressive and expansionist Egypt.

We have already seen that the first cataract of the Nile was in Aswan. where the granite bedrock forced the water into a series of fast-flowing rapids, if an ancient Egyptian were to travel upstream past Aswan and enter the lands of the Horizon, they would find five major Nile waterfalls. These are places where the river becomes shallow and traveling by boat becomes difficult and therefore were natural stops along any upstream journey. They were also the obvious place to draw borders during the Middle Kingdom. Egypt marched into the lands of the Horizon several times and pushed its southern border to the second cataract around the 1860s BC.

A Middle Kingdom king named Senos III marched even further south, toward the Nubian kingdoms of Kush and Punt. He remembers this brutal campaign in an inscription. The Nubians are miserable. Cowardly at heart. My Majesty has seen it. It's not a lie. I have captured their women. They carried off his subjects, poisoned his wells, killed his cattle, cut up his grain, set fire to it in this merciless manner. Senusret marched beyond the second cataract and built a mighty set of fortresses. The name gives us an idea of ​​the names the Egyptians gave them. one of them at Ascot was named crushing the Nubians, while another at Shalak was named subduing the foreign lands in another imposing fortress at Semna now more than 400 km Upstream from the ancient border of Aswan, Senusret left a stone monument With the following triumphant inscription, year 16. third winter month, the king established its southern boundary.

I have set my boundary further south than my parents. I have added to what was bequeathed to me. For any son of mine who maintains this border that my Majesty has established, he is my son, but he who abandons him who does not fight for it he is not my son he was not born to me these forts were manned by powerful units of Egyptian soldiers in charge To maintain order among the newly colonized Nubians, to this end they engaged in a regime of paranoid surveillance of the local population by sending Pharaoh Sines Rat constant updates on papyrus scrolls about the movements of even the smallest groups of Nubians, some of which have survived the patrol that went out to patrol the Desert's Edge from the Kive Maou Fortress in the year. three months three of the growing season the last day they have come to inform me saying that we have found the footprints of 32 men and three donkeys all these dispatches end the same way with the same comforting offer of peace of mind for the king all the affairs of the The king's domains are safe and sound, all the master's affairs are safe and sound, but we have reason to believe that King Senat was not entirely sure that he is famous for the numerous sculptures he had made of himself, statues carved in black diorite that depict him in Strangely realistic fashion, unlike any representation of a pharaoh that has appeared before in these statues, his ears extend to enormous proportions like a bat, perhaps projecting the image of a king who heard his every movement. in his kingdom conveyed by his extensive system of spies, three of these.

The statues in particular show the king first as a child, then as a man and finally in old age. In this last statue we get a sense of the mental toll it took on one man to sit at the top of this paranoid system. The tired sunken eyes of the pharaoh. With their gaunt face contorted into an expression of eternal worry, today these three statues are a kind of metaphor for the state into which the Egyptian Middle Kingdom had sunk during its final decades. Sen's son, Amat II, did exactly what his father's inscriptions had urged and urged the south. border against the Nubians, but after his reign Egypt was once again plunged into a succession crisis, the crisis was so severe that its next king was something that until then had been almost unthinkable a woman her name was SOC nephu possibly the The daughter, sister, or wife of the previous pharaoh was probably not the first woman to hold power in Egypt, but she was the first to obtain the full official title of king.

SOC Nephu used masculine titles in her inscriptions and a statue of her even shows her wearing an unconventional mix. of men's and women's clothing, however, failed to stem the decline of the dynasty. She died after ruling for only four years and left no heirs. After that, the serpent Isfet uncoiled once more and Egypt fell into chaos for the time that followed, known as the Second Intermediate Period. There were 150 years during which at least 50 kings ruled over Egypt once again divided into two and local governors stopped mentioning the king in their tomb inscriptions. The pyramids of this period had already become small and few, mostly built with mud bricks, but now.

Its construction stopped completely, some kings were even buried in simple pit tombs little better than those of commoners. Much of the Nile Delta in Lower Egypt had already broken away from the Empire and now, in the south, the people of Nubia were in open rebellion, one by one. The Egyptians were forced to abandon their southern forts, abandoning them to the Nubians, who were once a symbol of the Empire's trust. These powerful fortresses now became unprecedented military assets for their enemies and bases from which powerful raiding parties pushed deeper and deeper into Egypt. Egypt's trade links with the rest of the world were severely disrupted;

It was also during this time, or perhaps later, that the entire Mediterranean was actually most affected. The world witnessed one of the largest natural disasters in human history which is the eruption of the Thea volcano now known as the Greek island of Santorini just 700 km from the Egyptian coast, it is likely that the Egyptians would have heard the deep roar of this explosion. which exploded with the force of several hundred atomic bombs when the Indonesian volcano Katoa erupted in 1883 the explosion was heard more than 3,000 km away and the Thea explosion is believed to have been at least four times more powerful today the seawater-filled volcanic crater it left behind because the eruption is more than 10 km wide, this event could have ejected more than 40 square km of rock into the atmosphere, the black plume would have been torn apart by volcanic lightning and would have caused 10 m high tsunamis that would have devastated coastal regions such as In addition to causing a volcanic winter, the eruption may have wiped out the Manan civilization on Cre in one fell swoop, perhaps inspiring part of the myth of Atlantis and Chronicles as Far Away as China records a period in which the sky turned a strange yellow color and crop yields fell an The Egyptian inscription known as The Tempest Stell may record some in memory of this terrifying event the gods expressed their discontent the gods brought down the sky with A storm caused darkness in the western region.

The sky was unleashed more powerfully over the mountains than the turbulence of the Aswan Cataract. Every house, every shelter they reached. They spent days floating in the water like papyrus bark in front of the royal residence. Volcanic ash or tephra would have begun to rain over the entire region and today can be detected in virtually every location in the eastern Mediterranean. Caused by this natural disaster and exacerbated by the collapse of the Egyptian administration, famine soon descended upon the region once again. land, among all this, a powerful and mysterious force of outsiders must have been watching, they came from the eastern Mediterranean region from across the Sinai Desert and intended to conquer Egypt and rule for themselves, these people were known Like hixus, the word hios comes from the Egyptian phrase hea cut, meaning rulers of foreign lands.

It is unknown where exactly the hixus were from, but it is believed that they may have originated in the region of Syria and one thing seems to be that at this point, some form of chariot had been used by various societies for many centuries. Vehicles such as a kind of war chariot with four solid wooden wheels pulled by donkeys are represented in the Sumerian standard. of mineral that was created around the time the pyramids of Giza were being built, but Egypt had never experimented with this type of vehicle and during the previous Millennium technology had made great strides towards the chariots that the hixus first brought to Egypt time.

They had two wheels with light, fast spokes and each was pulled by two powerful animals that had recently been introduced to the region. Horse. These chariots were strong, mobile battle platforms that could break enemy battle lines, while onboard archers with powerful bows could cut down enemies. With missiles, whether the hixus came to Egypt as a violent invasion or a more peaceful migration is a matter of debate. People from the North had been settling in the Nile Delta for centuries and much of the population there was already what the Egyptians would consider foreigners. When the Hixus rulers arrived, but the Hixus were clearly not pacifists, they established their own kingdom in the Nile Delta with their capital at Avaris and, in a devastating blow to Egyptian morale, even headed south to capture the ancient capital. of Memphis, much later. called Hand records the arrival of the hixus by the main Force, they easily took over the country without striking a single blow and having dominated the rulers of the land, then they burned our cities without mercy, demolished the temples of the Gods, finally they named us King one of He had his seat in Memphis, collected tribute from Upper and Lower Egypt and always left the garrison in the most advantageous positions.

The pyramids, that great symbol of Egyptian prestige, were now in foreign hands. The Egyptian kings would now retire to their old capital in the High. Egypt, the city of thieves, with the Nubians was becoming more and more powerful in the south and now, with the new threat of these hixus kings looming from the north, the weakened Egyptians felt more and more as if they were being crushed. on a lathe for a time that must have seemed like ages. of an independent Egypt was led by a king called camosa who came to the throne of the Thieves around 1555 BC.

C. would explain this intolerable situation in the following terms. I would like to know what use this strength of mine is when one chief is in Avaris and another in Kush. and I feel united with an Asiatic and a Nubian, each in possession of his portion of Egypt and I cannot pass by him, until Memphis, no man can settle when, despoiled by the taxes of the Asiatics, I will fight with him to be able open his belly my desire is to save Egypt and wound the Asiatic king camosa may have had a very personal reason for hating the hixus the mummified remains of the previous pharaoh his father have been discovered and modern analysis shows that he suffered brutal head injuries a heavy bladed weapon, these blows must have cut his cheek and fractured his jaw and skull, leading many to conclude that he died on the battlefield, then the king's body was quickly taken to the robbers, where he was mummified hurriedly.

If Prince Camosa saw his father's body in this state when he was brought back to the city, we can only imagine the kind of hatred that must have burned in his heart towards the hixus invaders in the north, but many at the court of ca were clearly afraid of what a war with the hixus would be like. Due to the fragile state of the country, a text known as the Canavan tablet describes how they appealed to their King to keep the peace. We are calm in our part of Egypt, as the swan at the first cataract is strong and the middle part of the earth is with us men until for us the best of its lands allow our cattle to graze in the swamps of Papyrus is sent corn for our pigs our cattle are not taken away he owns the land of the Asians we control Egypt only when someonecomes against us we should act against him but the camouflage refused.

He wanted to deal a blow to the hixus but he knew that he would first have to secure the southern border and recapture the ancient fortress of Buhan just before the second cataract of the Nile. Buhan was one of the strong ones. walled bastions built by Senate III and was one of the only forts the Egyptians built with stone rather than brick, but since the collapse of the Middle Kingdom its garrison had served a Nubian lord from the kingdom of Kush if the southern order wanted resist while Camosa expelled the Hixus in the north he would need to recover Buhan's fort Camosa marched south preparing to assault the fort but it seems that upon seeing the huge Egyptian army on the horizon the citizens of the Fortress understood the message and decided to swear allegiance .

To Pharaoh without fighting this powerful force, the fort that now occupies southern Camosa returned to the robbers and prepared for the next campaign season, when he would seek to bring the war to the Hixus and unite Egypt once again in the third year of his reign camosa. I struck, sailed north with all my might to repel the Asiatics through the command of Amun with my brave army before me like a flame of fire and the archers are on top of the fighting decks. The ca fleet descended quickly on the hixus in what appears to have been something of a surprise attack caught off guard the foreigners were defeated and camosa's revenge was terrible when dawn came i was on him like a hawk when it was time for breakfast I demolished him having destroyed his walls and massacred his people and brought his wife down to the river bank my army acted like lions with their spoils, cattle, fat, honey, dividing their things, their hearts happy as if to avarus in both. rivers, I devastated them without inhabitants, I destroyed their cities and burned their houses until they became heaps of ruins forever because of the destruction they had caused in the middle of Egypt they who had allowed themselves to listen to the call of the Asiatics had abandoned Egypt their lover The king of the Hixus immediately appealed to his Nubian ally the king of Kush for help.

At one point the Egyptians intercepted a secret message traveling south along the desert roads whose contents they recorded. Have you realized what Egypt has done against me? The ruler who is there penetrates into my territory even though I have not attacked him as he has you, choose these two lands to afflict my land and yours and he has devastated them come north do not flinch then we will divide the cities of Egypt when this messenger returned to king hixus in battle ashamed and with the letter not delivered he must have known that everyone was lost the war came to a quick end and camosa recounts perhaps with some exaggeration his heroic return to the thieves who happy journey home for the ruler life prosperity happiness with his army ahead they had no casualties nor did anyone blame their companions nor did their hearts cry I dwelt in my native land during the flood season the river bank was shining the thieves were festive the women and men had come to see me each woman was hugging her neighbor no one was crying her son akosa would take advantage of this advantage and in an even more devastating way The campaign took over the ancient capital of Memphis and MOA would be the first pharaoh in at least 100 years into recovering the Great Pyramids of Giza and we can imagine his feelings as he contemplated the monuments of his ancestors Kufu and Cfre, which are already more than a thousand years old, it is clear that the site inspired him and he would even build his own pyramid in Upper Egypt at the site of Abydos.

This was one of the first pyramids built for an Egyptian pharaoh since the fall of the Middle Kingdom and was clearly designed as a symbol of renewal of the Empire's great legacy, but it would also be the last pyramid built by an Egyptian ruler after securing the Delta delta. Nile. Amoza marched north and even crossed the Sinai, passing through the traditional heartland of the Hixus people. and taking territory in Palestine in the region of modern Gaza, thereafter returning to the southern town of Kush and pushing the borders of the Empire further south than they had ever been beyond the second cataract to the river island of Sai now in northern Sudan from its lowest point.

Egypt had suddenly re-emerged as a major regional power. This was the era of the New Kingdom during the five centuries of the New Kingdom. Egypt would reach its greatest territorial extent and build some of its most impressive monuments and artifacts. Despite recovering Memphis, her kings saw nothing. reason to move the capital again, so they now once again ruled from the city of Thieves, upriver in Upper Egypt, Egypt had also adopted the horse-drawn chariot technology of their ancient enemies and their armies were now formed By powerful contingents of these vehicles during these centuries Egypt saw the rule of its first great woman, Pharaoh Hat Shepsut, who was one of its most prolific builders.

She built the imposing Temple complex at Carak and the majestic Mortuary Temple known as the Holy of Holies. She also undertook a voyage in five ships to the Land of Punt somewhere in Africa and brought incense trees and other goods to Egypt which she celebrated in an inscription the ships returned with the wonders of the Land of Punt and with all the good woods of tanut with piles of incense with trees that produce green fragrance with Ebony and pure ivory with gold and green agotas found in the land of the AMU with skins of the Southern Panthers never since the beginning of the world have wonders like these been brought by any King The New Kingdom would also see some of the most surprising dramas emerge in the royal courts of Egypt.

None of them has attracted as much attention as the story of a pharaoh; some have described him as a revolutionary, others as a visionary, and still others as a visionary. yet simply mad, he was a ruler named Aon hotep IV. Amon hotep came to the throne around 1350 BC. C. had inherited his name from his father, who had ruled as Amunhotep III, like most Egyptian names, it included the name of a god Amun and meant Amun is satisfied. Amun had long been the god of the city of thieves and was considered the god of fertility and wind, but when the hixus were expelled from Egypt and the thieves became the capital again, this god Amun received a kind of promotion.

He unified with the sun god Rah to create a composite deity now known as Amun ra, the perfect symbol of the power of a new United Egypt. Amun Ra was depicted as a man carrying a golden staff and wearing a high crown and would later be shown with blue skin this new deity was placed at the head of all the gods that the Egyptians worshiped the king of the gods and creator of the universe a hymn to Amun describes the primacy of his position Lord of Truth father of the Gods creator of men creator of all animals Lord of the things that are creators of the staff of life, the pharaoh Amon hotep IV would keep his name during the first four years of his rule, but around his fifth year on the throne he made the unprecedented decision to change his royal name.

Because he had a vision of a new belief system that he wanted to spread throughout Egypt, he wanted to end the disorder of Egyptian religion and the system of different gods in different cities, different temples, cults and priests, he devised a new system of beliefs. system of worship that centered not on any God but on the son himself who seemed to have believed that he was his true father. This new God would be represented as an impersonal disk that bathes the Earth with rays of light. It would be called simply the orb or in Egyptian, the arton that survives the arton, perhaps even written by Pharaoh himself, shows the enormous power that this new God was supposed to have, O Soul God like whom there is no other, you , this one creates the world according to your desire, you are in my heart there is no other who knows you in all the lands Talk that arises every day around the fifth year of his Reign the Pharaoh Amon hotap abandoned his old name that paid respect to the god Amon and changed it to a new name for his new God this new name meant effective spirit for the arton who was now Pharaoh Aken atan akatan is the first person recorded in history who started a new religion for himself.

He was also the first monotheist in the Kingdom of Akatan. Only the arton could be worshiped. The temples to Amun were eventually closed and all worship of the former God was prohibited. The king even sent workers and soldiers to every corner of Egypt, where they broke into the temples with hammers and chisels and cut Amoon's name from the walls. His determination to rid his kingdom of Amun. was so large that he even sent workers to climb to the top of the Red Pyramid of snu to engrave the name of amoon from the highest cornerstone of the pyramid so that the Egyptians, accustomed as they were to covering a large number of deities with prayers and offerings, this radical change must have seemed like a terrifying and risky gamble, many must have feared turning their backs on their old trusted gods and associated themselves with this new and untested ideology, but the king's word was the king's word and in Most of them seem to have coincided at the beginning.

Akatan turned old temples into thieves for the arton and even started building some new ones, but he soon left. The idea that ancient thieves' temples were covered in carvings and hieroglyphics praising the other gods and the depth of their history could not be erased overnight. The Thieves were also home to a powerful priestly class that resisted his reforms in response to this problem. Akatan made the notable decision to build a completely new capital, he would build it in the middle of the desert, in a completely uninhabited place halfway between Memphis and the thieves, he would call this city The Horizon of arton or in Egyptian aatan, standing out on the terrain bare and level. plain where he hoped to build his new city, Pharaoh Akatan gave the following proclamation to his courtiers: a piece of advice, none of the people who are in the entire land in AET Aton will make the house of Aton, this new city equipped with everything a royal capital needs: palaces for Akatan and his main wife, Nefatiti, along with their four others. wives gardens tombs administrative buildings and workshops and of course a vast temple complex for the new god Arton the construction of this city would take at least 8 years and when it was completed in the 12th year of his reign Akatan held a magnificent ceremony in the year 1342 BC in its new capital, Akatan received delegations from across the region, from the Hittites of Syria and from Mediterranean islands such as Cyprus and Creet, as well as from the Nubian lands of Punt and Kush in the south, all here to bear witness to the glory of his new city and his successful conversion of his empire the priests may have complained the common people it may have been Fred but he had finally done it the ceremony must have been grand filled with celebration and pomp musicians and dancers the burning of incense and banquets of excellent meals we can imagine the foreign guests listening to the singing of hymns like the following to the new God, you created the world according to your desire, all men, cattle and wild beasts, everything that is on earth walking on their feet and what is on high flying with its wings the countries of Syria and Nubia the land of Egypt you place each man in his place you supply separate stones in speech and their natures also each one has his food and his life span is calculated but The consequences of this piece of royal pomp were A terrible plague had been spreading through the Middle East for some time, affecting lands in Syria and the Hittite Empire in what is now Turkey.

A group of texts written around this time known as the Hittite Plague Prayers invoke the gods to deliver them from this disaster. People have been dying in Hati for 20 years. Will the Hati plague never disappear? I can no longer control the worry of my heart. I can no longer control the anguish of my soul with foreign dignitaries coming from all over the region with large entourages and no doubt groups of slaves in tow. A deadly dose of this disease reached the heart of Egypt that year. and from there it would have spread throughout the Nile if akatan had hoped that this ceremony would ensure the trust of his people in their new God then it could not It would not have been counterproductive in the pandemic that followed, no one was safe, it may even have been Numerous deaths have occurred within the Akatan family, perhaps including his mother, his wife, and three of his daughters, and if the situation were so serious, even in the relatively protected Royal Court, we can assume that in the general population the The effects were even more devastating for the people of Egypt.

This incomprehensible disaster must have seemed like the judgment of the ancient gods on the man who had so arrogantly turned his back on them.Akatan died only a few years ago. Later, around 1335 BC. C., after 17 years of rule after his death, some members of his family attempted to maintain the arton cult in the new capital of Akatan, now ravaged by the plague, they would take turns ruling for the next four years, but apparently without much success. Now the entire empire seemed to be on the verge of collapse, but finally one of Akin Natan's sons, a boy of only 8 years old, came to the throne.

His father had given him the hopeful name of Tank Arton or living image of Arton, but he would not rule under him for long, turning his back on his father's New Faith and facing a huge celebration throughout the empire in the third year of his government, he changed his name to the one we now remember him for the Living Image, not of arton but of the ancient God Amun now triumphantly received back by the people of Egypt his name was tutank Amun as symbolized by his change of name the boy King Tuton Kon returned a large number of his father's attempted reforms, ending all worship of the god Arton and reinstating amoon to supremacy in the thieves.

Tuton Kon lifted the ban on the cults of other gods and restored the traditional privileges of the priesthood. Many temples of Aron in the thieves and elsewhere were torn down and their painted bricks were used as fill in the walls of In other temples, everyone seemed to agree. Better to forget the whole sorry Akatan business. The boy King Tutan Kon is perhaps the most famous of all the Egyptian pharaohs, more famous than the great kufu and cfre of Giza or the pharaoh joser and snu. who perfected the pyramidal form, is more famous than camosa or akm MOA, who reunited the kingdom and expelled the hixus, more famous than his colorful father akatan or the great queen hat shepsut, but there is nothing in his reign that really justifies that level of recognition, in fact, this The boy King died when he was still a teenager after only 9 years of government.

He appears to have been a good and popular King and to have gotten Egypt back on track after his father's erratic reign, but the source of his fame was actually an absolute historical accident when he died in 1323 BC. C., the boy king Tutan Kon was buried in a tomb in the Valley of the Kings. It was not a particularly resplendent royal tomb and was a far cry from the glorious pyramids of the Old Kingdom, but soon after it was sealed there was a chance. A flash flood in this part of the necropolis and the entrance to the tomb was buried in sand and rock, leaving it completely hidden for the next 3,300 years.

Tomb robbers would roam the Valley of the Kings stealing from almost all of the great Pharaoh's tombs. They took away his treasures, removing his mummies and stripping away his decorations, but buried in the sand, Tutan Kon's tomb remained sealed. For this reason, it remained completely intact until 1922 when it was discovered by Egyptologist Howard Carter and all its artifacts were recovered to international astonishment. . Today, the most glorious of them, the golden funerary mask of Tutan Kon, is one of the most famous objects of the ancient world. A resplendent image of royal wealth and power. It can sometimes be difficult to remember that this golden image is also a portrait of a child upon whom power was imposed in a time of turmoil and strife looking down upon us from the dark depths of time, the New Kingdom of Egypt would reach its highest point.

About 50 years after the reign of Tutan Kon would come during the rule. Perhaps the greatest pharaoh of Egypt, he ascended the throne under the name of Rames II, but would go down in history as Rames. The Great Rames came to the throne at the age of 14 in 1279 BC, at the time when Egypt's Mediterranean coast was being devastated by groups of pirates, and spent much of his first rule dealing with this nuisance, but is most famous for pushing Egypt's borders northward into the region of Syria; Over the previous centuries, a powerful rival had grown in the mountains of what is now Turkey and was steadily extending his influence in all directions.

This was the powerful Hittite Empire centered on its hill fortress, the capital of Kusa. The Hittites were a relatively new power in the region, but their territory was rich and extensive. They had mastered the use of chariots. In war, they converted them from light hit-and-run vehicles into heavy armored ship shock troops and for the past two centuries Egypt had been fighting increasingly bitter wars with them over who would control the region of Palestine in the fourth year of his reign. Ramsey II assembled an expeditionary force. and he marched through the Sinai Desert to Gaza and from there he marched north.

An epic poem written about this expedition extols the enormous force that Rames brought. His majesty traveled north with his infantry and chariots with him. He began to walk along the good path that all foreign countries were on. trembling before him, his chiefs brought tribute to him and all the rebels came bowing down in fear of the personality of his majesty Ram from him. His Majesty Ram's goal was to capture the strong fortress city of Kadesh, situated along the sandy banks at a fork of the Arones River to For years, Kadesh had been pitting the Hittites and Egypt against each other, allying himself first with one and then with the other.

Now Rames was determined to finally seize Cadesh for Egypt. He marched north with four of his divisions who bore the name of the gods Amon Rah Seth and P with him. He brought thousands of chariots and a unit of elite chariot riders which he sent by sea telling them to land on the coast and travel inland to meet him on the day he arrived at Kadesh. At first everything seemed to be going well on his way to Pharaoh. The explorers captured a couple of tribesmen of the Shasu people, who told him that the Hittite king was hiding further north, he was afraid of the power of Egypt, they said he had left Kadesh defenseless, excited by this news, Rames abandoned all caution and rushed north to seize the city with only one of his four divisions, his proud troops of Amun, but this would prove to be a fatal mistake.

Rames did not know it yet, but these members of the Shasu tribe were actually agents of the Hitti king sent to lure him to a place. When he arrived at Kadesh, Rames set up camp next to a stony stream and his scouts went into the surrounding landscape to detect any threat. Some of these explorers came across a pair of Hittite soldiers who had been lying in the brush watching them. They skirmished and the Egyptians managed to capture the Hittites after perhaps a severe beating of these men revealed what awaited the Egyptians nearby: the full power of the Hittite armies massed in an ambush hidden behind the looming Fortress of Cadesh. .

Cadesh's poem records this awesome Force now. The rich enemy of Hati had arrived, gathering all foreign countries to the ends of the sea. The land of Hati in its entirety covered the mountains and valleys like grasshoppers with their multitudes. He left neither silver nor gold in his land but stripped it. Rames was furious at his generals for allowing this to happen. He had rushed forward with his Amon Division and was now critically overloaded with his reinforcements. In Rah's division, which was still on the road, the Hittites did not allow the Egyptians to regroup before Raah's division could arrive, a terrifying force of 2,500 Hittite chariots emerged from hiding and crossed the river plain.

The Hittite tanks were the tanks of their time, heavy. and protected their horsemen covered in chain mail up to their toes, these chariots rolled and crashed into the Raah regiment that was frantically trying to form a shield wall. The Hittites dispersed this division completely and then surrounded the Egyptians. Rameses' camp was surrounded and cut off from his reinforcements and now outnumbered, but in this situation Di relates how he gathered his men and led them in a desperate charge against the enemy. I found the 2,500 wagon lengths in whose midst I was turning into piles of corpses before my horses found any of them. their hand to fight for their hearts was cowed in their bodies by Terror of me and all their arms were powerless, so that they could not shoot nor find the courage to seize their javelins, whether or not this aggrandized account is an accurate description from that day, it is clear.

As the tide began to turn, the Egyptian soldiers were elite fighters and many of the Hittite forces may have been mercenaries or recruits. After destroying the Rah Division and entering the Egyptian camp, the chariots became stuck and many of the Hittite soldiers believed In the battle. that was already over they began to loot rather than press their advantage soon more Egyptian reinforcements arrived from the south and as the bloody afternoon wore on that contingent of elite charioteers who had been sailing along the coast also arrived on the scene the arrival of this Cavalry on the horizon was enough to steal the resolve of the Egyptian troops and break the power of the Hittites.

Rames offers a fluid interpretation of what happened next. I made them dive into the water like crocodiles dive, because they fell face down on each other while I. He killed among them those whom Nei wanted, neither one could look back nor the other turn back, and the one who fell could not get up. The Hittite army withdrew with many of its soldiers, pushed into the Arones river. When the next day dawned, the two sides faced each other again. but both had been fatally weakened by the fighting of the previous day after a few hours of bloody slaughter.

The Rames withdrew and the Hittite king sent him an offer of peace. Pharaoh's hands were tied. The Egyptians lacked siege equipment to breach the strong walls of Cadesh. and the only option for taking the city would have been a prolonged siege during which Ramses would have found his forces exposed to attack, poorly supplied and prone to being surrounded. Instead, he decided to declare victory and march back to Egypt. The Hittites, in turn, also declared victory and the city of Kadesh would escape the reach of Ramses despite the overflowing praise of Rames and his glorious victory in the Kadesh poem.

The war actually ended in a stalemate and the issue of the city remained unresolved, but it is clear that Ramses remembered his role during the battle with no little pride and decorated the walls of his temple at Abu Simbel with a huge bas-relief carving of each of the battles tour and tour, the The war with the Hittites would drag on for 15 more years and during this time Egypt would often capture territory along the Mediterranean coast only to lose it again the following year, before long both sides would tire of it. This blistering conflict finally put an end to the war. war with what has gone down in history as the first written peace treaty whose text has survived.

Behold, Atus, the ruler of the Hittites, is bound by treaty to Ramses, the chosen one of Rah the Great. ruler of Egypt from today so that perfect peace and brotherhood can be created between us forever, he being in brotherhood and peace with me and I being in brotherhood and peace with him forever, the treaty was written on silver tablets with the Hittites and the Egyptians being Upon receiving a copy, its text was written in both hieroglyphs and Hittite police form, but the two translations have slightly different wording in a diplomatic stroke of genius. The Egyptian version states that the Hittites had come to beg Egypt for peace, which the Egyptians graciously accepted while they were in the In the Hittite version, it was the Egyptians who asked to end the war with both sides, thus being able to save face.

The destructive conflict was allowed to come to an end and almost a century of relative peace ensued despite the pride Ramsey felt in his battles today. peace treaty that we remember most and a replica of it hangs on the walls of the United Nations Headquarters in New York after what seemed like a lucky escape in Cadesh Rames diverted his attention from the war and focused on the Construction in who spent the next decades of his rule building temples and monuments throughout Egypt and today his name is the one that appears on the most surviving monuments of any pharaoh.

This is partly due to his prolific building campaign, but also to the fact that he ensured that his name was inscribed more deeply. in the stone than any other pharaoh, so deep that he could never be erased. Rames II would rule for a total of 66 years and would be remembered as perhaps the greatest pharaoh of Egypt. His full Egyptian name was usat saten rames, which the Greeks would later convert into a name they found easier to pronounce. They would call him oim mandus. More than a thousand years later, the Greek writer Doodas of Sicily would visit Egypt and write an account of his visit to A Monument to Rames II at its entrance there is a pylon built with variegated stone for a plethora of width and 45 cubits high, the inscription says King of kings, it is I oim andus, if someone knew how big I am and where I am, that surpass one of my works, the rames would also builda new capital for his empire and with his military ambitions being in the north, he decided to locate it in the northeast of the Nile delta and characteristically gave it his name, calling it per rames or the house of rames, an Egyptian poem would celebrate the beauty of this new city, the residence. it is pleasant in life its field is full of everything good it is full of supplies and food every day its ponds with fish and its lakes with birds its meadows are green with grass its banks have dates its melons abound in the sands its granaries are so full of barley and wheat Emma that they approach the sky red fish swimming in the canal of the resident city that live in lotus flowers this city of per Ramses has long been associated with the city of rames mentioned in the Hebrew Book of Exodus, the second book of the Hebrew Bible.

Exodus describes a population of enslaved Hebrews forced to work building the city. The reality of the Exodus story has long been debated and is now considered a piece of ancient literature by most historians. Does not exist. evidence of a large population of Hebrew slaves once living in Egypt or that the city of Per Rames was built by slaves; It was most likely built using the usual Egyptian combination of skilled craftsmen and seasonal peasant workers, but with the proximity of the Nile Delta to the Lentine coast, it is certainly not impossible that some of these workers were Hebrews who had traveled to across the Sinai to sell his work in Egypt.

If that were the case, then for one reason or another they left no impression on the archaeological record, but perhaps left an indelible mark on our collective imagination when Ramses finally died in 1213 BC. C. he was probably almost 90 years old. His reign had been one of the Golden Ages of Egypt, but his long rule had once again created the problem of That Old King. All of his heirs were now too. Elders at the time of his death, 12 of his eldest sons had already died and now his 13th son took the throne at the age of about 70, he was Pharaoh Merar, but only a few years into this man's reign, Egypt was attacked by a devastating The new enemy was the Libyan people west of the Nile delta, the king of Libya, a man named Mer Ray, had apparently planned his attack for some time, suddenly a large Libyan army suddenly flooded the border northwest of Egypt and were reinforced with groups of people from around the Mediterranean perhaps from Greece Sardinia Sicily and other places across the sea these were a diverse group of peoples who had suddenly begun to appear in increasing numbers throughout the Eastern Mediterranean would later be known as the Sea Peoples Pharaoh Mpar remembers this event on a carved Stell The unfortunate fallen chief of Libya Maria, son of the dead, has fallen upon the country of Tunu with his archer Sheran Sheesh EES looker Teresh taking the best of every warrior and every man of war of his country who has brought his wife and children, leaders of the camp, and he reached the western limit in the fields of Pera, the Medar pharaoh defeated this invasion and, as a warning anyone else who attempted such a surprise attack, impaled many of the invading soldiers along the way.

On the way to Memphis the princes are prostrate saying Mercy, none lifts his head between the nine arches the desolation is for henu hati is pacified plundered is the Canaan with all its evils has become a widow all the lands together are pacified but these lands would not remain pacified long after the death of Pharaoh Merar around 1204 BC. C., Egypt entered a period of civil strife with the descendants of Rames fighting over who would take the crown. In this context, the entire region also began to once again experience a series of record droughts that caused This climate change is uncertain, as we saw in our second episode on the collapse of the Bronze Age, the cause may have been volcanic, with a large eruption that took place on the Icelandic volcano of Hecka around this time.

Others have proposed that an eruption in Sicily around 1300 B.C. been to blame or that the Thea supervolcano on Santorini may have resumed some activity some 500 years after its last huge eruption; The cause may not have been volcanic at all and could have been due to variations in the sun's activity or climate systems in the Atlantic depriving the Mediterranean of moisture. The reality was very similar to today. The planet's climate system is fragile, interconnected. and it is chaotic and even relatively small changes in its balance can have devastating effects during this time, once green lands became dry and arid and more plants adapted to desert landscapes flourished.

Analysis of sediment cores and oxygen isotopes in cave mineral deposits has shown that in the 13th and 12th centuries BC. There was much less rain than in previous centuries. In addition to this scientific evidence, we can see marks of severe drought in the written records of the region and in Egypt. The great rivals, the Hittites in their stony mountains, were especially affected by the drought. A Hittite text has come down to us that seems to capture the spirit of this time and is known as the myth of telepinu. It comes from a poetic convention known as The Myth of the Vanished God which describes how a certain deity is so offended by the misdeeds of humanity that he suffers a fit of sadness and abandons his duties.

Telepinu was a god of agriculture, fertility and climate. The beginning of the text has been lost, so I don't know what Humanity did to provoke its wrath, but the poem describes its deadly consequences, then the soot harassed the windows, the smoke harassed the house, the ashes lay piled up in the home, with stalks of TPU, grain and abundance that was taken from the field and the prairie for the thickets lurked tupenu and in a cops was buried with the seed stopped producing oxen sheep and men stopped procreating while even those who had conceived they did not produce the slopes were bare the trees were bare and did not put forth new branches the pastures were bare The springs dried up, a famine arose in the land, both men and gods were on the verge of perishing from hunger, while the Egyptians could Having celebrated this weakening of its great rival in Egypt, the situation was not much better.

A text dated around 1200 BC. It is called the lament to a moon and it rises like a whale of pain in a dark age, come to me Father moon Protect me in this bitter year of confrontation God shines in the sun but it will not shine the winter crowds last long over the months of summer passes in reverse disheveled hours Staggering drunks by the felled in the heights they cry out to you Amon these words came The poisoned air uttered by shepherds in fields and swamps by those who beat the clothes on the banks of the river by district police who abandon their compounds for horned beasts in our burning deserts during this period of unrest and chaos at the Royal Court of Egypt that lasted approximately a century.

A military strongman named Setak would eventually rise to power. he would rule alone for 3 years before dying and passing the throne to his young son this year. The boy was the Empire's last hope to turn around its faltering fortunes and if that hope was to be maintained, there was only one name that could possibly rule, his parents would name him after their great predecessor who had ruled R nearly a century earlier and had fought . in the battle of Kadesh and that is why this child would rule like Ramses. This new child. King Ramses was a determined and tenacious ruler and it is clear that he openly admired and sought to emulate the legendary pharaoh of old.

He even went so far as to name them all. After Ramses II's sons and he also gave them all the same positions at his court, it was clear that he wanted to do everything possible to recreate the Days of Glory that had escaped Egypt's reach, as he writes in a of their registrations. Rejoice, O Egypt, to the highest heaven, for I am ruler of the South and the North, on the throne of Atum. The gods have appointed me king over Egypt to be Victor and expel them from the countries they decreed me to do. Under other circumstances, Rames might have been one of the great rulers of Egypt, but the entire region would soon be convulsed in a series of bitter wars.

One of the great drivers of these conflicts was the group of peoples who had first appeared during the reign of Pharaoh Mapar and who are known as the Sea Peoples, these invaders were now descending upon the entire region in increasing numbers, apparently spurred by widespread crop failures in northern and western Europe and powerful trade. Cities such as the port city of Ugarit had been attacked by sea apparently by complete surprise and were destroyed so completely that they were never reoccupied. Egypt's great rivals, the Hittites, were now on the brink of collapse as trade networks around the region went into free fall. remember this time of struggle when these invaders from the north descended on the coast the countries where the northerners on their islands were disturbed were swept away in battle no one stood before their lands from Keta kemish arvat alasa they were wasted they set up camp in a place in Amore They desolated their people and their land in that way, which was not when the news of the Sea People's attacks reached Rames.

He would have been pharaoh for about 8 years. He had already repelled two more invasions of Libya and it must have been building his confidence, but the news. He worried him and soon learned that the fleet of the sea peoples was on the move and headed for Egypt, as recounted in the inscription of his mortuary temple at Medinet Habu. They came with fire prepared before them towards Egypt, their main support was peleset theel shees denen and Wes their lands were united and they laid their hands on the earth to the circle of the earth their hearts were confident full of their plans rames knew that these attackers would have To defend himself at the mouth of the Nile, the lush and fertile delta, he would have to take advantage of the strengths that the Egyptian army still had in this challenging terrain.

He decided to lay an ambush and give the sea peoples a surprise attack of their own. Now it happened. Through this God, Lord of the gods, I was prepared and armed to trap them like a wild beast, I equipped my Z-Border, I prepared before them the Chiefs, the infantry captains, the Nobles, I made them equip the mouths of the ports like a strong wall with galleys of warships. and barges were fully manned from stem to stern with brave warriors bearing their weapons, soldiers of Egypt's choicest were like lines roaring on the mountain tops, their horses trembling in every limb, ready to crush the countries beneath their feet like the enemy. the ships piled up rames they gathered archers on the banks supported by spearmen and cavalry by the thousands, all hidden in the reeds, the tension must have been tremendous, all the soldiers of the Egyptian army held their breath and waited for the first sign of an enemy ship and then , at last. a sail was called after that came another and another until the entire fleet of the sea peoples was in sight the Egyptians must have been able to hear the stream of 10,000 ORS the beating of the drums the shouts of the helmsmen and soldiers then a Once the town's boats were within range.

The struck arrows flew from the reeds and rained down on the ships. Panicking, the invaders attempted to land on the banks, but as they did so, Egyptian spearmen appeared outside the tree line and met them with a shield wall. While the enemy was cornered, the Egyptian Navy sailed down the river. Those who reached my limits, their heart and soul are finished forever and ever, as those who had gathered before them in the sea, the burning flame was on their forehead before the The mouths of the harbor and a wall of metal on the shore surrounded them, they were dragged, overturned and laid on the beach, killed and piled up from the stern to the bow of their GS while all their things were thrown into the water, so I made the waters recede to remember.

Egypt and when they mention my name in their land, let it consume them with fear. Pharaoh's plan had worked. The Egyptians were the first to drive back these maritime invaders and stop their campaign of destruction. The inscription of Ramses in Medina Habu ends with the following triumphant. note Rejoice, O Egypt from above in heaven, for I am ruler of the south and the north, on the throne of atum. I have expelled the regret that was in your hearts and made you dwell in peace. Those I have taken down will not do so. return, but despite their victory, the land of the pharaohs now stood alone in a devastated region, virtually all other societies around it had been gutted and reduced to ashes, numerous long-established civilizations, the evil Greeks, the Hittites, Ugarit and Babylon had collapsed and civil order had given way.

To the chaos, the precarious trade routes in whichAll they had relied on to supply bronze and other commodities were now broken and Egypt's economy went into a steep and unstoppable decline at the end of this period known as the collapse of the late Bronze Age. It was a shadow of its former self when other enemies invaded its borders. Egypt was able to fight them, but its treasury was so depleted that it never fully regained its imperial power. The first workers' strike in recorded history occurred during the 29th year of the reign of Ramsey III. Reigned when Egypt could no longer provide food rations for its elite craftsmen who were building the king's tomb in the village of De El Medina, the lack of rations lasted so long that the workers eventually marched through the city shouting the following chant: we have hunger. there is no more clothes, there is no more oil, there is no fish, there are no more vegetables, send a message to the pharaoh if the food did not reach these crucial workers, we can only imagine the terrible situation in the Great Kingdom, the dispute went on for weeks and one protest leader even threatening to damage a royal monument if they were not paid was a threat they would never have dared to make unless the pharaoh's authority was beginning to be seriously undermined.

Rames III ruled for another two decades later. of his battle with the sea peoples during a total reign of 31 years, but in the year 1156 BC. C. some members of his family were beginning to grow impatient at the Egyptian court. All the women, the king's wives and mothers, and other consorts, lived together in a large palace complex with their own palace. land this was convenient for the king but it could also encourage court intrigues there was a strict hierarchy with the queens of the pharaoh and everyone knew that the children of his main wife were going to be his heirs before any other some of the women who were lower On this ladder they could sometimes resort to plotting to improve their positions and perhaps get their own children on the throne.

Instead, one of these women was a queen named Ti Ti was a secondary wife of Ramses and her son Penta was not in line for the throne. To remedy this situation, he began a plot that would go down in history as the Haram conspiracy. He soon brought in other members of the king's household and even high-ranking members of the government, as a later papyrus records. They are the abomination of the earth. The great criminal who was then head of the chamber was in cahoots with you and the women of the harim with whom he had made common cause had begun to express his words to their mothers and brothers who were there saying to agitate the people inciting rebellion. against her lord alarmingly, one of the palace women had written to her brother named Cim Waset, a commander of the Nubian troops in the south, and gained his support for her plot, others had even resorted to supernatural methods to make effigies Casting curses on them to aid their plan, their plan was clear: kill Rames and install Queen Tia's son, Penta, as pharaoh.

The date they chose to attack was during the annual ceremony known as the Beautiful Valley Festival that was held in Thieves every year. On the new moon of the second month of the harvest season of Shemu, during this festival, which was one of the largest of the year, the pharaoh would go down to the river in a large and colorful procession carrying the statues of the three gods of thieves Amon. M y konu would then board his royal barge and sail with the statues to the Thean necropolis to visit its Great Temple, as an inscription by a Thean priest describes: Let us praise a moon by kissing the ground before the Lords of the Gods at their festivals. the first day of Shemu shining on the day of the journey to the valley here the citizens made offerings of food, drink and flour hours while the boats sailed down the river with three statues as the days progressed riotous Festival the conspirators took advantage of the interruption to attack to the king it was the 15th day of Shemu when the pharaoh was relaxing in the Royal Haram in the Western Tower of Medinet Habu, perhaps thinking about his role in the upcoming festivities when a group of assassins sneaked up on him. with knives, his attack was quick and brutal.

Modern scanning of the Rames III mummy reveals that her throat was cut to the bone with a sharp weapon that severed the trachea, esophagus and major blood vessels. Death would have followed in a matter of seconds. Rames has no defensive wounds, suggesting that he was caught completely off guard but, curiously, his big toe was cut off at the time of the attack. It seems unlikely that he would sustain an injury during a fight and studies of her mummy have shown that the embassies made her a prosthetic finger to take with her to the hospital. Further, this suggests that her original finger was never recovered, perhaps indicating that someone took it as proof that he was dead or as a Grizzly trophy.

Rames III had saved Egypt from the sea peoples, but now he lay dying in a pool of his own blood, betrayed by his own family, but the conspirator's plot did not go as planned after the bloody murder, Rames III's son was able to crush the coup and take the throne, all the conspirators were tried, as well as anyone who had heard of the conspiracy, but they did not report it in total, 28 people were executed and as a final punishment, they even had their names changed after his death. The brother of one of the conspirators who had commanded his Nubian troops in the south was originally called cim waset, a name that meant wine of thieves but after his execution he was renamed BM waset or evil in thieves another marir's name meant beloved of Rah but they gave him the somewhat spiteful new name meedu Rah or Rah hates him although order in the royal succession had been restored Egypt was in In a greatly reduced state, the death of Ramses was followed by years of disputes between his sons, three of his sons would become kings at different times, each feeling the need to commemorate him and shore up their own legitimacy by reigning as rames I, 4, 6 and eth.

In fact, the next eight consecutive pharaohs would be named rames in honor of the slain king, but many of these rulers were ineffective and reigned for only a few years each, meanwhile Egypt was increasingly beset by continuing droughts, lack of seasonal floods, famines, civil unrest and official corruption in this context by the government of rames I 11 a new power had begun to fill the vacuum left by royal authority these were the high priests of amoon in thieves this priesthood had become no only very powerful but extremely wealthy through a set of centuries of acquisition, the priests of Amun now controlled 2/3 of all temple lands in Egypt and 90% of all ships in Egypt along with mountains of gold, in addition They were the main prophets and interpreters of the will of the god Amun Ra, exercising a great number. of influence over the kings and their decisions over the past few centuries, they had changed the rules of the priesthood so that they could pass their positions on to their sons, essentially becoming a kind of feudal royalty in the hot lands of Upper Egypt.

The tomb of a high priest named Neb Enf describes the power of this new hereditary role. Now you are high priest of Amon, his treasury and his barn are under your seal. You are the CEO of his temple and every foundation of it is under your authority. The house of Hathor, Lady of Dinda, will now be under the authority of your son as heir to the offices of your ancestors, the position you have held until now. Soon the high priests of the thieves became the deao rulers of Upper Egypt, even having been buried in Grand. tombs and commanding his own armies in many ways, the pharaoh had become somewhat irrelevant and perhaps for that reason there would not be a Ramsey I 12.

With the death of RAM 11, the New Egyptian Kingdom finally fractured less than 80 years after the Victorious. battle with the peoples of the sea Egypt would never regain its former power for the next four centuries Egypt's influence would suffer a steady but unstoppable decline a text written around this time is called the story of wenam moon and describes an

egypt

ian diplomat who travels to the north to collect some cedar wood as tribute from the Phoenician city of Byblos, but while there he discovers that the pharaoh's name no longer has the kind of influence it used to when Amun is robbed on his journey and asks the ruler for help. of Byblos.

In the morning, when I got up, I went to the prince and told him. I have been robbed in your port. You are now the prince of this land. You are the one who controls it. Look for my money. In fact, the money belongs to King Amanra. of God, lord of the lands, he told me, are you serious, are you joking? In fact, I don't understand the demand you make of me to make things worse. The king of Byblos refuses to pay the Cedarwood tribute that the pharaoh demands. If this story is related to a real event. or it is simply a piece of literature, historians are not sure, but either way it points to the greatly reduced state of Egypt's position in the world, something that had clearly become common knowledge of the 21st Dynasty that ruled from the north of the Nile delta for a long time. from the 8th century BC.

They even descended from invading Libyan peoples along the North African coast to the west, while the first Libyan pharaohs adopted classical Egyptian names in the 22nd and 23rd dynasties, they returned to giving their children more ethnically Libyan names and even Although they wore Libyan feather headdresses to underline their identity, these Libyan kings were a rebellious group who held close to their old tribal loyalties and were frequently distracted by wars between themselves and their own lords and generals, while the high priests of Amun They continued to rule southern Egypt from robbers, but even further south, in the lands of Nubia, another power was emerging: this was the Nubian Kingdom of Kush, as one of the two main African kingdoms south of Egypt.

Kush was located at the fourth cataract of the Nile, around the region of Sudan today. For centuries, this Nubian Kingdom had been crushed under the boot of Egypt. Repeated Nile Expeditions had seen the Egyptian armies eliminate any sign of a powerful rival appearing in East Africa, but now with the fractured New Kingdom of Egypt and the Libyan Kings. Ruling in the north by fighting among themselves, the Kushites were free to build their own power base during Egypt's many attempts to invade and hold the Nubian lands. Egypt had left a number of powerful fortresses to the Kushites, one of them had even become the capital of Kush, the city of Napata, but the Egyptians had also left behind something more than their religion.

The upper classes in Kush had long adopted Egyptian gods and forms of worship. The Kushite rulers even referred to themselves as the son of Amun when Herodotus traveled up the Nile in the following centuries describing this region he knew as Ethiopia above Elephantine the country is now beginning to be inhabited by Ethiopians and half of the people of The island is Ethiopian and half of the Egyptians. Near the island there is a large lake on the shores of which the Ethiopian nomads live. The local people do not worship other gods except Amun and Osiris. They honor them greatly and have a sacred divination site for amoon, while Egypt had stopped building pyramids more than a thousand years earlier, the Kushite kings had resumed construction. of his own pyramids in the classical Egyptian style in some ways Kush had become more Egyptian than the Egyptians the kingdom was also becoming rich its economy driven by the Nubian gold mines it controlled and trade with sub-Saharan Africa this wealth soon led a powerful army The king of Kush, named Kashta, would seize the opportunity the situation offered him as the Libyan kings of Egypt quarreled and fought among themselves.

Kastar worked to gain influence over the thieves' high priests and eventually had his own daughter appointed to the powerful title of God's wife. of Amun in the Great Temple of Thieves, once he was in that position, he moved to consolidate his power and claimed the thieves and all of Upper Egypt for his father's Kingdom of Kush. The Libyan kings in the Nile Delta, distracted by their civil wars, did nothing to stop them. Upper Egypt was now ruled by Nubians when the Kushite king Kter died and his son PA inherited what was now the Kushite Empire sometime around 720 BC.

King Pi marched his Nubian armies down the Nile and conquered the fractured state of Lower Egypt. The Palestinian Authority was clearly pragmatic in its approach and allowed any local governor to remain in his positions as long as they pledged allegiance to him in a victory. dedicate here to the ancient Egyptian gods what I have done in surpassing the ancestors I am the king the representative of God who came out of the womb marked as a ruler who is feared by those greater than him whose father he knew and whose mother he perceived even in the egg that he would be a ruler loved by the godsson of Rah loved by a moon his son Shitu solidified these conquests and united Egypt once again for the next century EG Egypt would be ruled by the 25th Dynasty, the Nubian pharaohs during the decades that followed these Nubian rulers showed enthusiastic adoption of Egyptian culture, they used the Egyptian language, gave each other Egyptian names, and worshiped the Egyptian gods with apparent devotion.

They even embarked on an enthusiastic program of building pyramids in Nubia, the first the region had seen in centuries. nothing like the grand scale of the Old Kingdom, but this flowering of Egyptian culture would not last long because a power had finally emerged in the north that would eclipse the Egyptian Empire forever, that was the Empire of Assyria, as we saw in our Episode 13 Assyria had emerged in the valley of the Tigris and Euphrates rivers in Mesopotamia and in the 7th century BC. C. was perhaps the most powerful empire on Earth. They routinely amassed armies of over 100,000 soldiers and under the reign of the paranoid King Esar Hadon.

They were now pressing their power along the Mediterranean coast and soon dreamed of taking it to the banks of the Nile. The Nubian pharaoh who would confront them was a man called Tahara Tahara was the fifth king of the 25th Dynasty of Nubia and was clearly Proud of his heritage and the color of his skin, he ensured that the statues he commissioned were carved from hard, smooth, polished black granite. He had arrived in Egypt when he was a young prince and had been chosen to rule after the death of the previous pharaoh, as he writes in one. inscription I was brought from Nubia among the royal brothers that his majesty had brought as I was with him he loved me more than all his brothers and his children so he distinguished me I won the hearts of all the Nobles and I was loved by all It was only After the Royal Falcon flew to Heaven I received the crown in Memphis.

Interestingly, Tahaka also believed in the benefits of long-distance running and insisted that all of his soldiers participate in nightly marathon practice; the king himself was on horseback to see his army running when he exercised with them in the desert behind Memphis at the ninth hour of the night, they reached the great lake at the hour of dawn and returned to the residence at the third hour of the day , this extreme resistance would serve them well and they would engage in successful attacks on Libyan positions throughout the desert and capture territory in Palestine during their reign. Tahaka was lucky that a series of exceptional Nile floods led to a period of abundant harvests.

The funds were clearly so generous that he donated large amounts of gold to the Temple of Amun and restored several religious centers as one of his inscriptions boasts how his majesty is the one who loves the God in whom he spends the day in Lies by Night seeking what that is useful to the gods by building their temples that have fallen into Decadence, giving rise to their structures as in Primitive Times, by building their warehouses, providing them with altars, by presenting them with offerings of fine gold, silver, copper, now the heart of His Majesty is content to do what is theirs Beneficent every day this land is flooded in its time as it was in the time of the Lord of all, every man sleeping until dawn and never saying oh, I wish I had Egypt now had a size and stability it had not seen since the collapse of the New Kingdom almost 400 years earlier, it must have seemed like the dawn of a new era of prosperity, but this luck was not to last in 674 BC.

In Tara's 17th year on the throne, news came of a terrifying army approaching from the north. This horde belonged to King Esah Hadon of Assyria. Few enemies had defeated the Assyrians. On the battlefield and fear must have spread along the Nile, but somehow, against all odds, Tahara was able to repel this Force. The later Greek historian Herodotus records a fantastic story in which the invading Assyrian army was attacked by a horde of nocturnal plagues where the road enters Egypt there enemies arrived and during the night they were invaded by a horde of field mice that GED quiver and bows and handles of shields with the result that many died fleeing unarmed the next day for this reason to this day a statue for the Egyptian king stands in a temple with a mouse in his hand it is difficult to say what exactly this story records perhaps it was an outbreak of plague among the Assyrian army that forced them to return home perhaps it was even a daring night ambush by Tara's men conditioned as they were to run long distances in the middle of the night attack and then disappear into the night. darkness with its camp shattered and its army in disarray, the Assyrian army would have been pursued by Egyptian chariots to its borders, but we may never know.

It is perhaps not surprising that Assyrian sources make no mention of what must have been a humiliating defeat. The pain of this shame was clearly enough for three years later King Esah Haddon to gather an even larger Assyrian army and march back to Egypt; This time there was no position in his power. Just as the Assyrians flooded the Nile Delta and the Tahaka fled from Memphis and southward, the Assyrian advance was so rapid that Pharaoh was unable to evacuate his family when he abandoned the city. Esah Adon's troops took Memphis and the Assyrian king wrote the following. gloating inscription about his victory I killed multitudes of his men and struck him five times with the tip of my javelin with wounds from which there was no recovery Memphis his royal city in half a day with mines tunnels assaults besieged captured destroyed devastated I burned his queen with fire his Haram his heir and the rest of his sons and daughters his property and his goods his horses his cattle his sheep in innumerable numbers I took to Assyria the root of kush I uprooted from Egypt and not one from there escaped to submit to me over all Egypt .

I appointed a new king, vice, governors, commanders, overseers and scribes, my royal tribute and annual taxes ceaselessly imposed, but if ESO hadon expected to easily absorb Egypt into his Empire, he was wrong. Barely a year later, the Nubian king Tahara reappeared in the south reinforced with troops from the kingdom of Kush. Numerous governors that esah hadan had installed immediately reverted their allegiances and the entire Assyrian conquest looked like it might be undone. The enraged king esah hadon returned to Egypt to crush this Rebellious King but his health failed on the journey and he died in the city of Haran without reaching Egypt.

Esah Hadon son who took the throne was the Assyrian King Ashard Banipal practically his first act as King was to gather an army and march. to the rebellious province of Egypt to finish what his father had started and Aob Banipal easily overcame the now weakened Egyptian forces, recaptured Memphis and in 663 BC. C. he returned again to crush another round of rebellions; This time he marched south, up the Nile River and attacked the ancient capital of thieves. At that time the Nubian king Tara had died and his nephew Tantam Mani sat on the precarious throne of Egypt.

Tanani faced the Assyrians in battle. but he was defeated and with him the last hope of Egypt would die: the Assyrian army now surrounded the defenseless city of robbers asob banipal records what happened next in a carved cylinder this entire city I conquered with the help of Asher and ishar silver gold stones precious all the riches of the palace Rich fabric precious linen great horses overseeing men and women two obelisks of splendid electrum weighing 2,500 talant the doors of the eye temples were torn from their bases and carried to Assyria with this heavy loot I left thieves against Egypt and Kush I have raised my Spear and shown my power the Assyrian plunder The Thieves' War was the symbolic end of Egyptian power, although Assyria would not hold Egypt for long and would collapse in only about 50 years.

Egyptian esteem would never truly recover. A century later, Egypt was conquered by the Persian Empire of the Aeonids and in 343 B.C. was conquered. Again by the Macedonian forces of Alexander the Great, when Alexander's Empire collapsed, Egypt would remain in the hands of one of his former generals, Tomy SOA, for the next three centuries. Egypt would be ruled by its Greek Toic dynasty, who spoke Greek and mostly refused to learn the native Egyptian language, these Tommies were still in power. When the tide of Roman expansion swept across North Africa and eventually over Egypt, the The last independent ruler of Toic Egypt had a name that in Greek meant Glory of his father, from Clos meaning glory and Patra meaning father, her name was Cleopatra, it is not clear if Cleopatra had Egyptian ancestry since her mother is unknown, but At least he made an effort to learn Egyptian, since Plutar remembers that it was a pleasure simply to listen to the sound of his voice, which was like a many-stringed instrument, it could pass from one language to another so that few barbarian nations responded. as an interpreter to most of them she herself spoke as to the Ethiopians, Hebrews, Arabs, Syrians, Parthians and many others whose language she had learned, which was all the more surprising because most of the kings (her predecessors) barely took the trouble. of acquiring the Egyptian language when Rome finally invaded and occupied Egypt.

Cleopatra apparently committed suicide by drinking poison or scratching herself with a needle dipped in toxin. Some ancient writers suggested a famously fluid interpretation of her using a poisonous snake to commit suicide, and whether true or not, it has proven irresistible to generations of poets, including most famously William Shakespeare, with his death in August 30 BC. The independent Egyptian power also died on the day of her death. Cleopatra was at the height of more than 3,000 years of Egyptian history. For her, the Great Pyramid of Giza was now more than 2,500 years old, meaning that Cleopatra lived closer to our time than she did.

The construction of the Great Pyramid over 500 years is when Egypt came under increasing foreign influence. Its ancient culture gradually underwent a transformation over the following centuries as the Greek alphabet became more prominent. Knowledge of how to read hieroglyphs became more prominent. It was slowly lost as one records of medieval Arab visitors. I asked him why the inscriptions covering the pyramids and temples were indecipherable. He responded that since the scholars and writers have disappeared and Egypt has been occupied by a succession of foreign peoples, the Greek alphabet in writing has prevailed. and thus they lost their understanding of the writing of their ancestors.

The last known hieroglyphic inscription was written in 394 AD. at the temple of Philae built on an island near the Nile cataract in Aswan, by then the now Christianized Roman Empire had banned the worship of pagan gods in the temples of Egypt, but this religious site was just outside the borders of Rome , so the worship of the ancient gods continued here in the last of the great temples of Egypt here the names of Rah and P Anubis and haor Amon and bastet Seth and Horus would still be spoken and sung, the incense would still burn, the cats would still be fed, offerings would still be given, but this island The temple was increasingly isolated surrounding Ed by the breaking waters of a rapidly changing world.

The last hieroglyphic inscription records the sad wish of a scribe named Nesm. ER Akim wishing that his inscription endures forever like the carvings of his long-dead ancestors before mulus son of Horus by the hand of nzeta Kem son of nesm the second priest of Isis for all time and eternity words spoken by the man dulus lord of the abaton great God as the last such inscription, somehow fulfilled his wish, but it is likely that by the time he engraved this message on the temple wall, few people alive would know how to read it, as far as we know the art of the hieroglyph died with him, the temple was eventually closed sometime in the 530s by the Byzantine emperor Justinian and converted into a Christian church in honor of Saint Stephen.

The era of ancient Egypt had come to an end some 1,400 years later, in In the year 1818 the romantic poet Percy Bish would enter into a friendly competition with his friend the poet Horus Smith; both had read in a London newspaper about the upcoming arrival at the British Museum of a remarkable fragment of a statue brought by ship from the United Kingdom. Temple of Ramum Mory at the Thieves in Upper Egypt was the head and torso of a statue of Egypt's greatest pharaoh, the hero of the Battle of Cadesh Rames II, the statue was part of a pair that had been placed in the entrance to his temple.

The European colonial powers had long been hungry for that statue fragment. Napoleon Bonaparte had even attempted to remove it during his stay in Egypt in 1798, but found the black diorite mass of it too heavy to move. Now, with wooden rollers and hundreds of workers pulling ropes, the British team dragged the statue away. statue to the banks of the Nile, where it was transported down the river to London. After reading about this statue, Smith and Shelly agreed on a bet that they would each write a poem inspired by it and base their work on it.an extract from the writings of the Greek historian Diodorus of Sicily, who once visited the temple of Ramsey II as a thief, unfortunately for Horus Smith, history decisively concluded his competence as his poem is little remembered, but Shell's poem has been become a classic, one of the greatest and best-known songs. sonnets in English titled oie mandus is a poem that has come to stand out as an emblem of the vain and glorious pride of rulers, the inevitable fall of tyrants, the overwhelming power of time and the transience of all things.

I met a traveler from an ancient land who said that two fast, trunkless V-legs of Stone are found in the nearby desert. On the sand half sunken lies a destroyed Face whose frown and wrinkled lip and grimace of cold command say that its sculptor well those passions R that still survive stamped on those lifeless things the hand that mocked them and the heart that fed them and on the pedestal these words appear my name is oim mandas King of kings look at my works, powerful and desperate, nothing else remains around the decay of that colossal wreck, limitless and naked, the lonely and level sands stretch far away in the wall of a pharaoh's tomb in the Middle Kingdom is a piece of literature known as Harper's Song written in Egyptian hieroglyphics, it was a song designed to be sung at funerals and is more than 4,200 years old at the time of writing his poem oie mandus Percy Bish could not know anything about this piece of ancient literature, as the hieroglyphs would not be conclusively deciphered for several years, but across the Gulf of Four Millennia, he and the unknown author of this song describe a human emotion that is all too familiar: the deep sense of wonder and melancholy we feel. when we look at ruined places, the ruined palaces of long fallen emperors, the tombs of kings whose age has turned to dust as you listen, imagine the vast gulf of time that separates our world from theirs, imagine the sadness of seeing your forgotten language and your collapsed cities imagine the tombs of ancient kings lying open and plundered the fallen pillars of empty temples half buried in the sand that moves and rolls over the stones while the great disk of the sun turns red and burning for the last time Over the Empire of Egypt one generation passes, another is left behind, this has been the case since ancient times, the gods of old rest in their pyramids and yet the great and blessed also lie buried in their tombs, but those who built great mansions in their places are no longer what they used to be.

I have heard your words repeated over and over again, but where are your homes now? Its walls are in ruins and its places no longer resemble anything that has never existed. There is no return for them to explain their current state. say what it is like with them to soften our hearts until we make our journey to the place where they have gone, so follow your heart and your happiness conduct your affairs on Earth as your heart dictates, for that day of mourning will surely come for you, so that spends Spend your days with joy and do not get tired of living, no man takes his things with him and none of those who leave will ever be able to return.

E Harris, thank you once again for listening to the Fall of Civilizations Podcast. I would like to thank my voice actors for this episode Alexandra Bolton laan Lucas Michael hajian Antonis Tom Marshall Lee Nick Denton Peter Walters re brignol Lou Millington and Paul Cassel Arabic readings were done by Nasim El bjui Ancient Egyptian readings were done by HE NRA Muhammad Habib I would also like to thank my historical advisor for this episode Egyptologist Dr. Chris Nonon, you can find him on social media at chrison. He can also read his book titled Searching for the Lost Tombs of Egypt.

The main sources used in this episode were the rise and fall of ancient Egypt by Toby Wilkinson, as well as his ancient Egyptian writings. Edward Winter's Letters from Ancient Egypt. The Ancient Egyptian Literature of Miriam Liim. The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt edited by Ian Shaw and Mark Vanir. The history of ancient Egypt. Abdul Latif Al Al baghdadi's account of Egypt was translated by Tim. Macintosh Smith, a full list of sources can be found in the description below and are publicly available on the show's patreon page, as some of you may know that The Fall of Civilizations will soon be available in book form worldwide world.

The book is called The Fall of Civilizations. Stories of greatness and decline written by me, Paul Cooper, offers the definitive version of the program updated, expanded and with accompanying maps and images. The book will arrive in April 2024 for UK readers and later in the year for US listeners, head to Fallof Civilizations Tocom for more information and pre-order links, every pre-order helps boost rankings of the book and supports the program. I love hearing your thoughts and responses on Twitter, so come and tell me what you thought. You can follow me. on Paul mm Cooper and if you want updates on the podcast's announcements about new episodes, as well as images, maps and reading suggestions, you can follow the podcast on fall of civp pod with underscores separating the words, this podcast can only continue with the support. from our generous subscribers on Patreon, you keep me going, you help me cover my costs, and you help me keep the podcast ad-free.

It also allows me to spend more time researching, writing, recording, and editing so you can receive episodes faster and give them as much life and detail as possible. I want to thank all my subscribers for making this happen. If you enjoyed this episode, consider heading over to patreon.com slof civilizations podcast or just Google fallof civilizations patreon que es p a t r e o n to contribute something and help keep the podcast running for now all the best and thanks for listening