Ancient Egypt: three thousand years on the Nile

Egypt is mostly desert. What made a civilization possible was the Nile, which flooded every summer and left behind a layer of dark, fertile silt along a narrow strip of land. Egyptians called their country Kemet, the black land, after that soil, and called the desert Deshret, the red land.

The flood was regular enough to plan around. Farmers sowed after the water went down and harvested in spring, and the state measured the height of each flood with markers now called nilometers. A high flood meant a good harvest and higher taxes; a low one meant hunger. Much of Egyptian government was, at bottom, the management of that annual cycle.

Around 3100 BCE, Upper Egypt in the south and Lower Egypt in the Nile delta were joined under a single ruler. Later tradition named him Menes, and he is often linked with the king Narmer, whose carved palette shows a ruler wearing the crowns of both lands.

The pharaoh was more than a king. He was treated as the living link between gods and people, responsible for maintaining maat, the cosmic order of truth, balance and justice. That idea gave the monarchy remarkable staying power: even foreign rulers who conquered Egypt later presented themselves as pharaohs to be accepted.

Historians divide Egyptian history into long stable periods separated by times of division. The Old Kingdom, from about 2686 to 2181 BCE, was the age of the great pyramids. The Middle Kingdom restored central rule after a period of breakdown and is remembered for its literature. The New Kingdom, from about 1550 to 1070 BCE, was an imperial age, when Egypt pushed into the Levant and Nubia.

Famous names cluster in the New Kingdom: Hatshepsut, one of the few women to rule as pharaoh; Akhenaten, who tried to replace traditional religion with worship of the sun disc Aten; the young Tutankhamun, whose nearly intact tomb was found in 1922; and Ramesses II, who reigned for about 66 years.

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2560 BCE and was the tallest human-made structure on Earth for thousands of years. Its builders were not enslaved foreigners, as popular stories once claimed. Excavations of workers' villages near Giza show organised crews who were fed bread, beer and meat, received medical care and were buried with honour near the monuments.

The work combined a permanent core of skilled builders with seasonal labourers, likely drawn from farming villages during the flood season when fields were under water. Stone was quarried nearby, while finer limestone and granite were brought by boat. A papyrus diary found at Wadi al-Jarf records one team shipping limestone blocks for the Great Pyramid.

Hieroglyphs combined signs for sounds with signs for whole words and ideas. Scribes also used faster cursive scripts, hieratic and later demotic, for everyday documents. The ability to read the old writing was lost in late antiquity and only recovered after the Rosetta Stone, which carries the same decree in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek, allowed Jean-François Champollion to decipher it in 1822.

Egyptian religion paid enormous attention to what came after death. Bodies were mummified so the soul could return to them, and tombs were supplied with food, furniture and texts to guide the dead. In the judgement scene of the Book of the Dead, the heart of the deceased is weighed against the feather of maat.

• From about 1070 BCE Egypt was repeatedly divided and ruled at times by Libyan, Nubian, Assyrian and Persian kings.
• Alexander the Great took Egypt in 332 BCE, and his general Ptolemy founded a Greek-speaking dynasty based in Alexandria.
• Cleopatra VII, the last active Ptolemaic ruler, died in 30 BCE, and Egypt became a province of Rome.
• Temples kept working for centuries under Roman rule; the last known hieroglyphic inscription dates to 394 CE.