Summary of Ancient Egyptian Culture

Political History

Our earliest glimpse of Egypt is of a country already civilized. Menes, the first of the Pharaohs, changed the course of the Nile and founded Memphis. His successor was a physician, and wrote books on anatomy. Khufu, Shafra, and Menkara, of the IV dynasty, built the three Great Pyramids at Gizeh. In their time there were already an organized civil and military service and an established religion.

From the VIth to the XIth dynasty the monuments are few and history is silent. Thebes then became the center of power. The XII dynasty produced Lake Moeris and the Labyrinth, and waged war against the Ethiopians.

Meanwhile the Hyksos invaded Lower Egypt and soon conquered the land. At last a Theban monarch drove out the barbarian strangers. The XVIIIth and XIXth dynasties raised Egypt to the height of her glory. Thothmes, Amnnoph, Seti, and, chief of all, Bameses II., covered the land with magnificent works of art, and carried the Egyptian arms in trinmph to the depths of Asia. After the XXth dynasty Egypt began to decline. Her weak kings fell in turn before the Ethiopians. the Assyrians, and, finally, the Persians. The illustrious line of the Pharaohs was at length swallowed up in the Empire of Persia.

General Character of Egyptian Civilization

In summing up our general impressions of Egypt, we recall as characteristic features her Pyramids, Obelisks, Sphinxes, Gigantic Stone Statues, Hieroglyphics, Sacred Animals, and Mummies. We think of her worshiped kings, her all-powerful priests, and her Nile-watered land divided between king, priests, and soldiers. We remember that in her fondness for inscriptions she overspread the walls of her palaces and the pillars of her temples with hieroglyphics, and erected monuments for seemingly no other purpose than to cover them with writing. We see her tombs cut in the solid rock of the hillside and carefully concealed from view, bearing on their inner walls painted pictures of home life. ' Her nobility are surrounded by refinement and luxuries which we are startled to find existing 4000 years ago ; and her common people crowd a land where food is abundant, clothing little needed, and the sky a sufficient shelter.

We have found her arehitecture of the true Hamite type, colossal, massive, and enduring; her art stiIf, constrained, and lifeless; her priest-tanght schools giving special attention to writing and mathematics ; her literature chiefly religious, written on papyrus scrolls, and collected in libraries ; her arts and inventions numerous, ineluding weaving, dyeing, mining and working precious metals, making glass and porcelain, enameling, engraving, tanning and embossing leather, working with potter's clay, and embalming the dead. Seeing her long valley inundated each year by the Nile, she made herself proficient in mathematics and mensuration, erected dikes, established Nilometers, appointed public commissioners, and made a god of the river which, since it seldom rains in Egypt, gives the land its only fertility. Her religion, having many gods growing out of One, tanght a judgment after death, with immortality and transmigration of soul ; its characteristic form was a ceremonial worship of animals as emblems or iincarnations of Deity. Finally, as a people, the Egyptians were in disposition mild, unwarlike, superstitiously religious, in habits cleanly, luxurious, and delighting in flowers ; in mind subtle, profound, self-poised; in social life talkative, given to festivals, and loud in demonstrations of grief ; having a high conception of morals, a respect for woman, a love of literature, and a domestic affection which extended to a peculiar fondling of their mummied dead.