Don't Know Much About Mythology - Kenneth C. Davis [31]
Over time, the small farming and herding communities became part of two kingdoms: one controlled the villages that lay in the Nile Delta, where the river spreads out before emptying into the Mediterranean, and which came to be known as Lower Egypt; the other controlled the villages south of the Delta area and was called Upper Egypt. Most of the people in ancient Egypt lived in the Nile River Valley and there may have been between 1 million and 4 million people living in Egypt at various times.
Dark-skinned and dark-haired, the Egyptians spoke a language that was related to the Semitic languages spoken in the modern Middle East—including Arabic and Hebrew—and recent linguistic discoveries place ancient Egyptian among a family of languages called Afro-Asiatic, spoken in northern Africa. By around 3100 BCE, their language was also written in hieroglyphics, a complex system in which more than seven hundred picture symbols stood for certain objects, ideas, or sounds. Recent discoveries show bone and ivory with a form of hieroglyphic script dating as far back as 3400 BCE, and it is supposed that the Egyptian hieroglyphic system may have been invented for administrative and ritual purposes. Some scholars believe that Egypt’s writing system developed with Sumerian influence, as certain character types appear in both written languages; others argue that the differences between these two ancient writing systems are greater than their similarities. What is certain is that from the earliest days of Egyptian civilization, hieroglyphics were inscribed on monuments, temples, and tombs, and were set down on official texts, many of which were preserved over the centuries in Egypt’s hot, dry climate, providing generations of scholars and archaeologists with a rich array of sources for studying Egypt’s past.
Egypt’s long history has fascinated many other foreign people, including the Greeks going back to the time of Socrates, Plato, and Herodotus. But serious “Egyptology” began two hundred years ago with the cracking of the secret of the Rosetta Stone, which caused many previous theories and assumptions about Egypt to fall by the wayside. Recent research into Egypt’s prehistory has begun to transform a long-accepted version of the civilization’s earliest days. There is now evidence that a succession of southern (or Upper Egypt) kings, including one known as Scorpion, grew more powerful in the fourth millennium BCE, and references to well-known gods of Egypt have been found this far back in Egyptian history. The key event in the beginning of that history took place about 3100 BCE, when a king of Upper Egypt, traditionally called Menes the Uniter, but now often identified as Narmer, conquered Lower Egypt. One of the key pieces of evidence for this event is the Narmer Palette, a double-sided carved slate that depicts a king subduing a captive, along with other symbols that suggest a united kingdom.
Merging the two Egypts into one, Narmer and his successors, who may have included Menes (some historians think that they are the same person), began the process of forming the world’s first national government. Around 3000 BCE, Memphis was founded as a capital near the site of present-day Cairo. What is also clear from the Narmer Palette and other very old artifacts is that the close connection between gods and kings was well established by the time the country was unified. From its earliest beginnings, Egypt was a theocracy, and its very ancient gods were intricately connected to the Egyptian government throughout its long history.
While doubt has been cast on the existence of Menes, a king named Aha is now counted as the first of Egypt’s many kings in a succession of thirty-one dynasties—or families of kings—that ruled the country right down to the time of Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. During the early period of Egyptian history, the Egyptians developed irrigation systems, invented ox-drawn plows, and created the world’s first bureaucracy. Based at Memphis and anchored by religious beliefs, the Egyptian national government