Hot answers tagged ancient-egypt
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The Sumerians are widely credited with being the first real civilisation on Earth, beginning in around the 5th millennium BC. Cities and agricultural communities existed before this time, but are generally not considered to have constituted a civilisation. The Sumerians, who were situated in modern-day lower Iraq and Kuwait, are widely believed to have ...
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Maybe your source was National Geographics. However, it completely fails at explaining where this theory comes from and which facts speak in its favor (it prefers to present it as a fact). This BBC article does only a marginally better job, it lists some evidence but one is bound to ask whether a different interpretation of the same evidence wouldn't have ...
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No, they were not. The Ptolemys were the last dynasty to rule Egypt directly in the old fashion. When the Romans took over, they just treated it as another province in the empire.
In 30 BC, following the death of Cleopatra VII, the Roman Empire
declared that Egypt was a province (Aegyptus), and that it was to be
governed by a prefect selected by the ...
9
Papyrus was known to the Greek world since the 8th century BC, as it's mentioned in the Odyssey:
[Hom. Od. 21.390] Now there lay beneath the portico the cable of a curved ship, made of byblus plant, wherewith he made fast the gates, and then himself went within. Thereafter he came and sat down on the seat from which he had risen, and gazed upon ...
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The Serapeum is actually a smaller "branch" of the original library, formally part of the Temple of Serapis. The temple was converted to a Christian church by Theophilus around 390 AD, and it appears this is the reference you have noted above. This "branch" was not actually destroyed, but there is no doubt that many documents were destroyed during the ...
7
Isra'el means "he struggles with God" and is the name granted to Jacob after he wrestles with an angel in Genesis 32:
Then Jacob was left alone, and a man wrestled with him until daybreak. When he saw that he had not prevailed against him, he touched the socket of his thigh; so the socket of Jacob’s thigh was dislocated while he wrestled with him. Then ...
6
In 30 BC Cleopatra, Mark Anthony, and Caesarion (Ptolemy Caesar) famously met their deaths in the aftermath of the Battle of Actium at the dawn of the Roman Empire and the Augustan Age.
Ronald Syme (in The Roman Revolution) provides this account of the Ptolemaic dynasty's demise in Egypt:
The children of Cleopatra presented a more delicate problem ...
5
I think this probably falls into the same category as questions like "When did the Roman Empire Fall?" If you're ever on Jeopardy and somebody asks you that question, you should probably answer "476 AD," but there are entire books written about how and why that isn't the case.
Kind of the same deal here, especially depending on how you want to interpret ...
5
The main Greek innovation in education was the Socratic Method. This mainly involved the teacher questioning the students, hopefully leading them to a better understanding of things that way.
I don't know much about Egyptian education, but between the times of Alexander and Mohammed the upper classes in Egypt were culturally Greek anyway.
By comparison you ...
5
That we don't know exactly how they did it doesn't mean that we can't duplicate what they did. There are no exact descriptions of precisely how the great pyramids were built, and that means we will never know for sure how they were built. But it does not mean that they had some ancient and mysterious knowledge that has been lost, or that it was aliens, or ...
4
The theory I formerly heard was that demi-barbarian Dorian greeks from the north overran their literate Mycenaean brethern to the south. The surviving displaced Mycenaeans then took to their boats and moved south into the levant and Egypt, where they became known as Philistines and Sea Peoples respectively. Sort of a domino effect.
For instance, I believe ...
3
Those are all facts about its construction.
The pyramids at Gisa are aligned pretty accurately north, if you are building something that big and you don't have theodolites and RTK-GPS then having a fixed star to aim at is a very easy way to get the sides parallel. If there is/was any religous significance to the Pole star I suspect it was invented by the ...
3
The reason to remove the brain wasn't because it was "useless", but because it was among the first tissues to decay. From http://si.edu/encyclopedia_si/nmnh/mummies.htm
The first step in the process was the removal of all internal parts that might decay rapidly. The brain was removed by carefully inserting special hooked instruments up through the ...
3
Mummification wasn't limited to pharaohs, state officials could get mummified as well (while obviously not being buried in pyramids). In fact, the overwhelming majority of mummies found aren't pharaohs and most of them remain unnamed. E.g. the title of one article discussing a cancer case is "Colon cancer in a Ptolemaic mummy from Dakhleh Oasis". While I ...
2
Robert Drews wrote The End of the Bronze Age, and he presents a number of theories about what ended the Bronze Age. The most likely result was the destruction of every known city (except for Memphis and Thebes) by military conquest by the Sea Peoples. Several of the cities were destroyed repeatedly, so it appears that the city burners would return to ensure ...
2
Few years ago I read article in popular slovak scientific magazine about one of these theories. The article was very interesting and what's important based on rational evidence rather than fabulous stories. The main point of this theory was that pyramid blocks were casted instead of carved. In another words the pyramid blocks are artificial stones casted ...
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It is generally accepted that sibling marriages were widespread among all classes in Egypt during the Graeco-Roman period. Numerous papyri and the Roman census declarations attest to many husbands and wives being brother and sister.
-wiki
Here is a large article on the subject of incest in ancient Egypt. It seems, that in the Old Kingdom it was not in ...
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While providing links is not the best way of answering, Wikipedia's article on History of Astronomy could, in this case, be made-to-order.
It reviews astronomical evolution, beliefs and practices right from Babylonians to modern astronomy sequentially and points to dedicated chronicles were relevant (ex- Egyptian, Indian, China etc.)
1
Most probably sledges rather than log rollers.
The problem with rollers is that you need extremely high compressive strength, so they don't get crushed, and very smooth flat strong roads for them to roll along.
There is a tomb painting of a statue being dragged along on a wooden sledge with a lot of people pulling on ropes and a couple of workers pouring ...
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