The Decipherment of Hieroglyphs By Simon Singh

A forgotten script

Hieroglyphs dominated the landscape of the Egyptian civilisation. These elaborate symbols were ideal for inscriptions on the walls of majestic temples and monuments, and indeed the Greek word hieroglyphica means 'sacred carvings', but they were too fussy for day-to-day scribbling, so other scripts were evolved in Egypt in parallel. These were the 'hieratic' and 'demotic' scripts, which can crudely be thought of as merely different fonts of the hieroglyphic alphabet.

The rise of Christianity was responsible for the extinction of Egyptian scripts...

Then, towards the end of the fourth century AD, within a generation, the Egyptian scripts vanished. The last datable examples of ancient Egyptian writing are found on the island of Philae, where a hieroglyphic temple inscription was carved in AD 394 and where a piece of demotic graffiti has been dated to 450 AD. The rise of Christianity was responsible for the extinction of Egyptian scripts, outlawing their use in order to eradicate any link with Egypt's pagan past.

Ancient Egyptian Coptic script  ©The ancient scripts were replaced with 'Coptic', a script consisting of 24 letters from the Greek alphabet supplemented by six demotic characters used for Egyptian sounds not expressed in Greek. The ancient Egyptian language continued to be spoken, and evolved into what became known as the Coptic language, but in due course both the Coptic language and script were displaced by the spread of Arabic in the 11th century. The final linguistic link to Egypt's ancient kingdoms was then broken, and the knowledge needed to read the history of the pharaohs was lost.

They assumed that hieroglyphs were nothing more than primitive picture writing...

In later centuries, scholars who saw the hieroglyphs tried to interpret them, but they were hindered by a false hypothesis. They assumed that hieroglyphs were nothing more than primitive picture writing, and that their decipherment relied on a literal translation of the images they saw. In fact, the hieroglyphic script and its relatives are phonetic, which is to say that the characters largely represent distinct sounds, just like the letters in the English alphabet. It would take a remarkable discovery before this would be appreciated.

The Story of the Nile By John Baines

Harnessing the Nile

Throughout antiquity, Egypt's standing relied on its agricultural wealth and, therefore, on the Nile. Agriculture had not been the original basis of subsistence, but evolved, together with the land itself, during the millennia after the last Ice Age ended around 10,000 BC, expanding greatly from about 4500 BC onward.

By 3100 BC the Nile Valley and Delta had coalesced into a single entity...

By 3100 BC the Nile Valley and Delta had coalesced into a single entity that was the world's first large nation state. As well as providing the region's material potential, the Nile and other geographical features influenced political developments and were significant in the development of Egyptian thought.

The land continued to develop and its population increased until Roman times. Important factors in this process were unity, political stability, and the expansion of the area of cultivated land. The harnessing of the Nile was crucial to growth.

Rosselini's copy of an 18th Dynasty painting showing an Egyptian drawing water  ©It is uncertain how early and by how much the inundation was regulated. By the Middle Kingdom (c.1975-1640 BC) basin irrigation, in which large sections of the floodplain were managed as single units, was well established, but it may not have been practised in the Old Kingdom (c.2575-2150 BC), when the great pyramids were built. The only area where there was major irrigation work before Graeco-Roman times was the Faiyum, a lakeside oasis to the west of the Nile. Here Middle Kingdom kings reclaimed land by controlling the water flow along a side river channel and directing it to irrigate extra land while lake water levels were lowered. Their scheme did not last.

Health Hazards and Cures in Ancient Egypt By Joyce M Filer

The environment

Many accounts of ancient Egypt begin by stressing the influence of the environment, and particularly the great River Nile, on the everyday life of its people. It is a good place to start in considering the health of the Egyptians, as the Nile was the life- and health-giving source of water for drinking, cooking and washing. It also, however, harboured parasites and other creatures that were less beneficial.

Irrigation channels harbouring parasites, in a modern agricultural scene  ©As people waded through standing water, particularly in the agricultural irrigation channels, parasites such as the Schistosoma worm could enter the human host, via the feet or legs, to lay eggs in the bloodstream. These worms caused a lot of damage as they travelled through various internal organs, making sufferers weak and susceptible to other diseases.

These worms caused a lot of damage as they travelled through various internal organs...

Sometimes ancient Egyptians took in guinea worms in their drinking water. The female guinea worm would travel to its preferred site - the host's legs - in order to lay her eggs, again causing ill health.

Despite the fairly wide range of foodstuffs, cereals, fruits, vegetables, milk and meat produced by the ancient Egyptians, not everybody would have had adequate nutrition. There is evidence from the bodies of ancient Egyptians, retrieved from their graves, that some people suffered nutritional deficiencies.

...some tomb builders complained of headaches, others were too drunk to go to work, and some had emotional worries.

As in other societies, ancient Egyptians also suffered from more everyday types of sickness. Records reveal that some tomb builders complained of headaches, others were too drunk to go to work, and some had emotional worries. Although it is difficult to gain information from mummies and skeletons about eye complaints, some artwork suggests that such problems were not uncommon. Flies, dirt and sand particles would have caused infections in the eyes and lungs. Many Egyptians wore eye paint, which may have been an attempt to ward off eye infections - it is now known that the green eye paint containing malachite had medicinal properties.

The End of the Amarna Period By Dr Marc Gabolde

Apogee and decline

Little is known about the last five years of Akhenaten's reign, or the three year period after his death leading up to Tutankhamun's accession to the throne. Many theories have been advanced and the uncertainty has been compounded by the appearance during these years of new royal personages whose origins and identity remain a matter for debate.

The evidence that survives from the Amarna period is often badly damaged and in many cases throws up more questions than answers.

Among them is Kiya, the mysterious secondary wife of Akhenaten. Who was Kiya and where did she come from? Prince Tutankhaten, better known as Tutankhamun is also intriguing. He is generally thought to be the son of Amenhotep III or the son of Akhenaten and Kiya, but careful investigation has thrown new light on his parentage. The king called Smenkhkare, thought to be a brother of Tutankhaten by most scholars is perhaps the most mysterious figure. His identity has often been confused with a female pharaoh who many scholars have identified as Nefertiti using a different name. I propose that this pharaoh is not Nefertiti, but quite a different person altogether. And I also suggest a radically different identity for Smenkhkare, which I have pieced together from the various sources available. Finally, I will offer my view of the reasons for the dramatic collapse of the first monotheistic experience in history.

The evidence that survives from the Amarna period is often badly damaged and in many cases throws up more questions than answers. Given this puzzling situation, I am presenting in this article some of my new views, which are often in complete disagreement with the theories of other scholars, but which may help us to understand the succession of events at the end of Akhenaten's reign.

Ramesses the Great By John Ray

Jupiter of pharaohs

Ramesses II is the most famous of the Pharaohs, and there is no doubt that he intended this to be so. In astronomical terms, he is the Jupiter of the Pharaonic system, and for once the superlative is appropriate, since the giant planet shines brilliantly at a distance, but on close inspection turns out to be a ball of gas. Ramesses II, or at least the version of him which he chose to feature in his inscriptions, is the hieroglyphic equivalent of hot air.

Nowadays this ruler's name is known to every knickknack-seller in the Nile Valley, a posterity which would not have embarrassed him in the least. Ramesses has gained a multimedia afterlife: his mummy is flown from Cairo to Paris to be exhibited and re-autopsied, and a series of airport-lounge best-sellers by a French writer, Christian Jacq, gives a soap-opera version of his life.

Ramesses II...is the hieroglyphic equivalent of hot air.

Yul Brynner captured the essence of his personality in the 1956 film The Ten Commandments, and in popular imagination Ramesses II has become the Pharaoh of the Exodus. The history behind this is much debated, but it is safe to say that the character of Ramesses fits the picture of the overweening ruler who refuses divine demands. The king's battle against the Hittites at Qadesh in Syria was a near defeat, caused by an elementary failure of military intelligence, and saved only by the last-minute arrival of reinforcements from the Lebanese coast. In Ramesses' account, which occupies whole walls on many of his monuments, this goalless draw turns into the mother of all victories, won single-handedly by himself.

One of the best guides to Egypt ever compiled was the work of James Baikie (1866-1931), who wrote his detailed account of the country without ever seeing the place. Baikie's down-to-earth reaction to the interminable accounts of this battle reads as follows:

Primary Sources of the Old Kingdom By Jaromir Malek

Preoccupation with death

The historical period that we call the Old Kingdom (2686-2160 BC) was immensely long, lasting as it did for over 500 years. When it began, the unified Egyptian state was only about 300 years old and when it came to an end, the state still had nearly 2,000 years left ahead of it. Remoteness in time is one of the main difficulties we encounter when we look for sources of information about the Old Kingdom. Many simply have not survived.

We know infinitely more about the wealthy people of Egypt than we do about the ordinary people...

We know infinitely more about the wealthy people of Egypt than we do about the ordinary people, as almost all the monuments were made for the rich and influential. Houses in which ordinary Egyptians lived have not been preserved, and when most people died they were buried in simple graves with few funerary goods.

The Old Kingdom pyramids at Giza  ©Most of our traditional sources of information about the Old Kingdom are those concerned with death and the rituals surrounding death: these include pyramids, tombs and graves, but also statues, reliefs and paintings. Even papyri come mainly from pyramid temples. But this does not mean that death was the Egyptians' only preoccupation.

There are other reasons why so much of our evidence is based on funeral rites. Egyptian towns and villages were situated in the Nile valley, where old houses were pulled down and new ones built on the same spot, because space was valuable - so little remains of the older buildings. Pyramids and tombs, by contrast, were built on desert margins, where the space was not needed for other buildings, so were left to tell their tale centuries after they were built. Also, while domestic housing was made of sun-dried bricks, pyramids and tombs were built of stone - so their chances of survival were infinitely better.

Hatshepsut and Tuthmosis: a royal feud? By Dr Joyce Tyldesley

Endless death

Pharaoh Hatshepsut enjoyed a peaceful and prosperous reign. She built magnificent temples, protected Egypt's borders and masterminded a highly profitable trading mission to the mysterious land of Punt. She should have been feted as one of the most successful of the 18th Dynasty kings. Not everyone, however, was impressed by her achievements.

The female king vanished from Egyptian history.

Soon after her death in 1457 BC, Hatshepsut's monuments were attacked, her statues dragged down and smashed and her image and titles defaced. The female king vanished from Egyptian history. She would remain lost until, almost three thousand years later, modern Egyptologists reconstructed her damaged inscriptions and restored her to her rightful dynastic place.

The Egyptians believed that the spirit could live beyond the grave, but only if some remembrance - a body, a statue, or even a name - of the deceased remained in the land of the living. Hatshepsut had effectively been cursed with endless death. Who could have done such a terrible thing, and why? Tuthmosis III, stepson and successor to Hatshepsut, seems the obvious culprit, but we should not condemn him unheard. There are two major crimes to be considered before we draw any conclusion.

Egypt: The End of a Civilisation By Dr Aidan Dodson

Defining the end point

The civilisation of ancient Egypt can be traced back in recognisable form to around 3000 BC. It was to endure for over three millennia and it is perhaps the most instantly recognisable of all ancient cultures today. The question of how it came to an end is a perennially popular one, but actually quite difficult to answer, as it is by no means agreed as to what constitutes 'the end' of Egypt as an ancient civilisation.

...the demise of the hieroglyphs was a manifestation of the decline and fall of the ancient religion...

Is it the definitive end of native Egyptian rule (at least until the 20th century)? In this case the answer would be the flight of King Nectanebo II in 342 BC. Is it Egypt's absorption into the Roman Empire in 30 BC? Or the last appearance of the ancient hieroglyphic script just before AD 400? Or the closure of the last pagan temples in the sixth century?

In many ways the last suggestion is perhaps the most appropriate, as in all the other cases, the core religious and artistic values of the country continued on, albeit increasingly debased and under pressure. However, the demise of the hieroglyphs was a manifestation of the decline and fall of the ancient religion in the face of Christianity, itself ultimately to be supplanted by Islam.

Akhenaten and the Amarna Period By Dr Kate Spence

The appeal of the Amarna period

Some people are drawn by interest in Akhenaten himself or his religion, others by a fascination with the unusual art which appeals strongly to the tastes of modern viewers and provides a sense of immediacy rarely felt with traditional Egyptian representation. The radical changes Akhenaten made have led to his characterisation as the 'first individual in human history' and this in turn has led to endless speculation about his background and motivation; he is cast as hero or villain according to the viewpoint of the commentator.

Akhenaten came to the throne of Egypt around 1353 BC. The reign of his father, Amenhotep III, had been long and prosperous with international diplomacy largely replacing the relentless military campaigning of his predecessors. The reign culminated in a series of magnificent jubilee pageants celebrated in Thebes (modern Luxor), the religious capital of Egypt at the time and home to the state god Amun-Re. The new king was crowned as Amenhotep IV (meaning 'Amun is content') and temple construction and decoration projects began immediately in the name of the new king. The earliest work of his reign is stylistically similar to the art of his predecessors, but within a year or two he was building temples to the Aten or divinised sun-disk at Karnak in a very different artistic style and had changed his name to Akhenaten in honour of this god.

The radical changes Akhenaten made have led to his characterisation as the 'first individual in human history ...

Akhenaten's 'great king's wife' was Nefertiti and they had six daughters. There were also other wives, including the enigmatic Kiya who may have been the mother of Tutankhamun. Royal women play an unusually prominent role in the art of the period and this is particularly true of Nefertiti who is frequently depicted alongside her husband. Nefertiti disappears from the archaeological record around year 12 and some have argued that she reappears as the enigmatic co-regent Smenkhkare towards the end of Akhenaten's reign.

Ancient Egyptian Magic By Dr Geraldine Pinch

Magicians

In Egyptian myth, magic (heka) was one of the forces used by the creator to make the world. Through heka, symbolic actions could have practical effects. All deities and people were thought to possess this force in some degree, but there were rules about why and how it could be used.

The most respected users of magic were the lector priests...

Priests were the main practitioners of magic in pharaonic Egypt, where they were seen as guardians of a secret knowledge given by the gods to humanity to 'ward off the blows of fate'. The most respected users of magic were the lector priests, who could read the ancient books of magic kept in temple and palace libraries. In popular stories such men were credited with the power to bring wax animals to life, or roll back the waters of a lake.

Statue of Sekhmet  ©Real lector priests performed magical rituals to protect their king, and to help the dead to rebirth. By the first millennium BC, their role seems to have been taken over by magicians (hekau). Healing magic was a speciality of the priests who served Sekhmet, the fearsome goddess of plague.

Lower in status were the scorpion-charmers, who used magic to rid an area of poisonous reptiles and insects. Midwives and nurses also included magic among their skills, and wise women might be consulted about which ghost or deity was causing a person trouble.

Amulets were another source of magic power, obtainable from 'protection-makers', who could be male or female. None of these uses of magic was disapproved of - either by the state or the priesthood. Only foreigners were regularly accused of using evil magic. It is not until the Roman period that there is much evidence of individual magicians practising harmful magic for financial reward.

Mummies Around the World By Dr Joann Fletcher

Beyond the hype

Although the recent discovery of a 2500-year-old Persian mummy has proved to be a fake, the word 'mummy' is generally believed to derive from a Persian word, mummiya, meaning 'bitumen', used to describe the blackened state of ancient Egyptian bodies. The term is now generally applied to all human remains which retain their soft tissue, either by natural means or artificial preservation.

With 'mummy unwrapping parties' all the rage, otherwise sanctimonious Victorians felt no qualms desecrating pre-Christian bodies...

Mummification can be found on every continent of the world, but the process itself is inextricably linked with the culture of ancient Egypt and for many the word 'mummy' is synonymous with Egypt itself. Indeed, when the first mummy studies began in the early 19th century, those examined were almost always those brought back as souvenirs from wealthy tourists' travels in Egypt. With 'mummy unwrapping parties' all the rage, otherwise sanctimonious Victorians felt no qualms desecrating pre-Christian bodies and even sent specially-printed invitation cards: 'Lord Londesborough at Home: A Mummy from Thebes to be unrolled at half-past Two'. Even less fortunate were those mummies exported to the US for use in the papermaking industry or even, as Mark Twain reported, to be burnt as railroad fuel.

In popular fiction mummies were reduced to little more than bandaged corpses with arms outstretched as they staggered towards some hapless victim. In Bram Stoker's 'Jewel of the Seven Stars', his reanimated Egyptian princess established an enduring image of the villainous mummy endlessly repeated by Hollywood, from Boris Karloff's 1932 film 'The Mummy' ('It comes to Life!') to the current big-budget re-makes of recent years..

Yet lost beneath the fiction and the hype is the fact that these totally fascinating, wonderful 'artefacts' were once living people, and preserving them in as lifelike a way as possible was actually regarded as a way of providing a permanent home for the soul whilst effectively denying and ultimately cheating death itself.

The Great Pyramid: Gateway to Eternity By Dr Aidan Dodson

Egyptian world of the dead

For ancient Egyptians, it was of key importance that when someone died their physical body should continue to exist on earth, so they could progress properly through the afterlife. Consequently, providing proper eternal accommodation for their body after they had died was very important to them. The afterlife they wanted to attain was thought of as a bigger and better version of the earthly Egypt - and in it they were to live close to their family and friends.

The Pyramid Texts  ©There was one exception to this rather homely vision of the next world. This was for the king, already a divine being on earth, who would complete his apotheosis on death. According to the earliest set of texts dealing with the next world, the Pyramid Texts, which were inscribed inside the royal tombs of 2500-2300 BC, the king would dwell with his fellow gods in the entourage of the sun-god, Re. He would spend eternity traversing the sky and underworld: one might be tempted to regard the fate of his subjects as more desirable.

The sun god Re on his nocturnal journey, from the tomb of Ramesses I in the Valley of the Kings  ©

The spiritual part of the dead person was believed to have a number of aspects, including the ba, the akh, the ka and the 'shadow'. Of these, the ba was depicted as a human-headed bird, in which form the spirit could travel around and beyond the tomb, able to sit before the grave, taking its repose in the 'cool sweet breeze'.

The deceased, in whatever ethereal form, however, required sustenance for eternity...

The concept of the akh was somewhat more esoteric, being the aspect of the dead in which he or she had ceased to be dead, having been transfigured into a living being: a light in contrast to the darkness of death, often associated with the stars.

The notion of the ka was even more complex, being an aspect of the person created at the same time as the body, and surviving as its companion. It was the part of the deceased that was the immediate recipient of offerings, but had other functions, some of which remain obscure. The deceased, in whatever ethereal form, however, required sustenance for eternity, and it was with this basic fact in mind that the Egyptians' tombs were built.

Building the Great Pyramid By Dr Ian Shaw

Great debate

Since at least the time of the ancient Greeks, there has been considerable debate about exactly how the Egyptians constructed King Khufu's Great Pyramid at Giza.

A reconstruction of a pyramid-worker chiselling stone in a quarry  ©Few texts concerning Egyptian engineering methods have survived the centuries, and in recent years experimental archaeology has been the main means for discovering the methods used for building the structure. Despite this, there are still many questions concerning the quarrying, dressing and transportation of the stone building blocks, let alone the methods by which they were placed meticulously in position. And there are further questions still about how the gigantic edifice was erected on a totally horizontal base, and aligned precisely with the stars.

A Short History of Pyramidology By Kevin Jackson

Fringe beliefs

The Great Pyramid of Giza was built for King Khufu (known to the Greeks as Cheops) some four and a half thousand years ago. It is a structure of such awe-inspiring dimensions that many people across the centuries have found it hard to credit its creation to human beings. And even harder to realise that these human beings had not fully mastered the use of, say, the simple rope pulley, let alone explosives, mechanical diggers, power drills, cranes and helicopters.

...the Great Pyramid is also an astonishing feat of geometrical accuracy.

Quite apart from its sheer size (until the construction of the Eiffel Tower at the end of the 19th century, it was by far the tallest building in the world), the Great Pyramid is also an astonishing feat of geometrical accuracy. And there is evidence to suggest that its builders had a remarkably precise knowledge of astronomy, too.

The Great Pyramid at Giza  ©

Today, thanks to the labours of generations of scholars, we have constructed a pretty clear account of how this remarkable work was achieved. Archaeologists have traced the technical development of the pyramid form from earlier types of Egyptian tombs; uncovered the quarries from which its stones were cut and hauled; located the remains of the barracks complex in which the work force was housed; calculated and painstakingly re-enacted the process of its construction.

A few minor points of ambiguity remain: for example, though all the experts agree that some form of giant ramp must have been used in building the higher levels, it has not been settled what kind of ramp this was. For the most part, though, everyone who has studied the matter seriously now agrees that the Pyramid was built over the course of some 20 or so years by a work force of some 20,000 people, of whom 4,000 were the hard core of labourers. And despite the familiar Hollywood image, it is also known that the workers were not slaves, but short-term conscripts, performing a kind of National Service.

...there are many who persist in attributing the Great Pyramid to some agency outside the human race.

This account of the making of the Great Pyramid, although rich and coherent, does not satisfy everyone, and there are many who persist in attributing the Great Pyramid to some agency outside the human race. There is a whole branch of the publishing industry devoted to meeting this hunger for pyramidical mysteries, which is sharpened by movies such as Stargateand The Fifth Element, and shows no sign of tapering off in the 21st century.

This accumulation of fringe beliefs is sometimes known as 'pyramidology'; some of its major tendencies are described here, with catch-all names for the sake of brevity.

Ancient Egypt and the Modern World By Dr Joyce Tyldesley

A popular subject

Five thousand years ago the chain of independent city-states lining the River Nile united to form one long, thin country ruled by one king, or pharaoh. Almost instantly a highly distinctive culture developed. For almost 30 centuries Egypt remained the foremost nation in the Mediterranean world. Then, in 332 BC, the arrival of Alexander the Great heralded the end of the Egyptian way of life.

All ancient civilisations have contributed in some way to the development of modern society.

The unique culture was quickly buried beneath successive layers of Greek, Roman and Arabic tradition, and all knowledge of Egypt's glorious past was lost. Only the decaying stone monuments, their hieroglyphic texts now unreadable, survived as silent witnesses to a long lost civilisation.

Some 2,000 years on, however, the ancient hieroglyphs have been decoded and Egyptology - the study of ancient Egypt - is booming. At a time when Latin and ancient Greek are rapidly vanishing from the school curriculum, more and more people are choosing to read hieroglyphs in their spare time. And the Egyptian galleries of our museums are packed with visitors, while the galleries dedicated to other ancient cultures remain empty.

To emphasise the point, University Egyptology courses are full to bursting, and night school classes are attracting increasing numbers of people happy to spend their leisure hours studying the far distant past. This obvious interest has become self-fulfilling. Publishers and television producers are happy to invest in ancient Egypt because they know that there will be an appreciative audience for their work, and every new book, each new programme, attracts more devotees to the subject.

All ancient civilisations have contributed in some way to the development of modern society. All therefore are equally deserving of study. Why then do so many people choose to concentrate on Egypt? What does the culture of ancient Egypt offer the modern world that other cultures - those of Mesopotamia, the Indus Valley, or China - do not?

Those who have been bitten by the Egyptology bug cite a variety of reasons for their addiction - the beauty of the art, the skill of the craftsmen, the intricacies of the language, the certainties of the priests - or even a vague, indefinable feeling that the Egyptians came as close as is humanly possible to living a near-perfect life. Individually these would all be good reasons to study any ancient civilisation. Combined, and tinged with the glamour bestowed by some of the world's most flamboyant archaeologists, they make an irresistible package.