2. INTRODUCTION TO ANCIENT EGYPT
ADMINISTRATIVE: Prof. Wilfong's office hours still TBA
Section meetings this week
No recording or professional note-taking without permission
Academic integrity issues: no cheating
EGYPT
·Location
·Modern Egypt vs. Ancient Egypt
·Geography and Environment
•Historical overview
Egypt in the modern world
MODERN EGYPT:
Arab Republic of Egypt
Area: about 400,000 square miles
Population: about 55,000,000 people
Official Language: Arabic
Majority Religion: Islam
(significant minority of Coptic Christians)
Government: Republic
Main sources of income: Agriculture and Tourism
ANCIENT EGYPT
Kemet
Aigyptos, Aegyptus > Egypt
Area: varies
Population: never more than a few million
Official language: Ancient Egyptian, later Greek
Religion: indigenous Egyptian belief system (subject of course!)
Form of government: monarchy (divine king as ruler)
Major economic activities: Agriculture and (later) tourism
Nile River:
-Nile flows north from central Africa
-Annual flooding of Nile irrigates farm land
-Nile branches into Delta
-Nile flows into Mediterranean Sea
NILE: cross-section
-Nile
-Farm land/flood plain
-Low desert
-High desert
Regular cycle of agriculture
Cyclical thinking/cyclical time
Repeating religious calendar
Environmental features important for religion?
Nile
Sun
Desert
Fertile farm land
Water
Ancient Egypt:
Dating
Chronological Systems
Dating Systems:
B.C. / A.D.
"Before Christ" / "Anno Domini"
B.C.E. / C.E.
"Before Common Era" / "Common Era"
Course covers roughly
3000-300 BC/BCE
"Circa"
or "c."
"About"
As in:
c. 1950 B.C.E. =
"about 1950 B.C.E."
Kinds of evidence
Archaeological evidence
Context:
Funerary (tombs, burials)
Temple (sites of worship, cult)
Settlement (where people lived)
Representational Evidence
Painting, drawing, sculpture, etc.
Egyptian conventions of representation:
-Human figures as composites of views
-Canon of proportions
-Size relates to status
-Art as diagram: limited use of perspective
Textual evidence
Written words, connected text, compositions
Egyptian writing: hieroglyphs and cursive forms:
-picture writing
-signs represent sounds and/or ideas
-vowels not written
-interaction of text and image
Egyptian language
Scripts:
Hieroglyphic
Hieratic
Demotic
Coptic
Egyptian Language
"Afroasiatic family"
Semitic: Akkadian, Hebrew, Arabic, etc.
African: Bedja, Berber, Bantu, etc.
Rosetta stone
Egyptian
Hieroglyphs
Demotic
(also Egyptian)
Greek
Greeks and Romans
Plutarch (important for Egyptian religion)
Manetho:
Egyptian history divided into
DYNASTIES
(families of rulers)
Egyptologists:
Further group dynasties into periods:
Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, etc.
First Intermediate Period, Second Intermediate Period, etc.
Problems for the beginning Egyptologist:
Names
Different spellings
Amen, Amon, Amun, Ammon, etc.
Amenhotep, Amunhotpe, Amenophis, etc.
Egyptian versus Greek
Hor/Horus, Ise/Isis, Djheuty/Thoth,
Taweret/Thoëris, etc.
Dates
No one agrees!