The Olympics: Ancient versus Modern By Dr Stephen Instone

Origins

Traditionally it has always been said that the Games started at Olympia in 776 BC, about the time that Homer was born. But for several centuries before that date Olympia had been a cult site for the worship of Zeus, a numinous location away from human dwellings, overlooked by a hill, with the sacred River Alph flowing through it.

What was it that caused people to change from honouring Zeus solely with dedicatory offerings, to honouring him through athletics? Several factors seem to have been involved. One is the rise of the Greek polis, or city-state. As city-states in different locations grew, each wanted a means of asserting its supremacy, so would send representatives to Olympia to become supreme in physical competition.

The Games were an attractive means of getting men fit.

Connected with this is the development of military training. The Games were an attractive means of getting men fit. Another factor is the traditional Greek view that the gods championed a winner, so by establishing a competition aimed at producing supreme winners, they were thereby asserting the power and influence on humans of the supreme god, Zeus.

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.