an overview of ancient Egypt,

which corresponds geographically pretty closely

to the modern day state of Egypt in northeast Africa.

Now the central feature in both ancient Egypt

and in modern Egypt is the Nile River

that you see in blue right over here.

And the Nile River is one of the great rivers of the world.

It rivals the Amazon River as the longest river

and it sources the tributaries of the Nile Rover

start even south of this picture

and the water flows northward

and eventually its delta reaches the Mediterranean Sea.

The delta, which is where a river opens into the sea,

is called a delta because, as you can see, these rivers,

you can even see it from

the satellite pictures right over here,

they start branching up a bunch

and you have this upside down triangular region,

which looks a little bit like

an upside down Greek letter delta,

so that's why river delta is called that.

And this one just happens to be upside down.

If it was flowing the other way,

it would be a right-side-up delta.

So the Nile River, it flows from, you could say,

eastern mid-Africa up into the Mediterranean Sea

and because it has this northward flow,

the southern parts of the river are upriver

and they are actually called the Upper Nile.

So, Upper.

The Upper Nile is actually south of the Lower Nile,

of the Lower Nile.

And once again, that's because the Upper Nile is up river,

it's also flowing from higher elevations

to lower elevations.

So as you go south, you get to higher and higher elevations.

Now, the reason why the river is so important,

we studied this multiple times,

rivers are a source of fresh water,

when they flood they make the surrounding soil fertile,

they're suitable for agriculture,

and the Nile Valley is one of the first places

that we see agriculture emerging

during the neolithic period.

In fact, human settlement we believe

was along this Nile River Valley

as far as 6,000 BCE or 8,000 years ago,

and it might have been there even further back in time.

And because you have that agriculture,

it allowed for higher population densities,

which allowed for more specialization of labor

and more complex societies.

It's not a coincidence that some of the first,

that one of the first great civilizations emerged here.

Now, the story of the Nile River, or of Egypt,

and actually they are tied very closely,

even though Egypt is considered a lot of this region,

most of the human population, this is true even today,

is right along the river, around that fertile soil,

where the agriculture actually occurs.

In fact, this was so important to the ancient Egyptians

that their whole calendar, their seasons,

were based on what the Nile River was doing.

They had a season called the inundation,

or the flooding of the river, which makes the soil fertile.

They had a season of growth,

which is now talking about the growth of the crops

and they had a season of harvest.

And so you had people in this valley for thousands of years,

but when we talk about ancient Egypt,

we formally talk about it as a civilization

around 3,100, 3,150 BCE.

And this is where we get to our timeline right over here.

So we're talking about right around there on our timeline

and the reason why this is considered

the beginning of the ancient Egyptian civilization

is this is when we believe

that upper and lower Egypt were first united

under the king and there's different names used,

Narmer sometimes or Menes.

I'm going to mispronounce things

every now and then and I'm probably doing it here as well.

And so he was the king that unified upper and lower Egypt

into an empire and the empire, as we will see,

which lasted thousands of years,

every one of these spaces is a hundred years.

We're gonna go over huge time span,

but the ancient Egyptian civilization is roughly divided

into three kingdoms.

You have the old kingdom, which went from about,

right from about the 27th century BCE

up to about the 17th century BCE.

You have the middle kingdom and you have the new kingdom.

And once again, this is spanning right over here

over a thousand years of history.

And in between those, you have these intermediate periods

where the kingdom or the empire

was a little bit more fragmented.

You have in some of these intermediate periods,

you have some foreign rule.

But just to get a sense of some of what happened

over this thousands of years,

and I'm kind of laughing in my head

because it's hard to cover over two, 3,000 years,

in the course of just a few minutes,

but this will give you a sense of what ancient Egyptian

civilization was all about.

Now the kings are referred to as pharaohs

but as we'll see that term pharaoh is not really used

until we get to the new kingdom.

But I will refer to the kings as pharaohs

throughout this video,

just to say, hey these are the Egyptian kings.

And the old kingdom is probably most known today

in our popular culture for what we most associate

with ancient Egypt and that is the pyramids.

And here, right over here are the pyramids,

there's the Great Pyramid of Giza,

which is near modern-day Cairo today.

This is the Sphinx and they were built in that old period

under the Pharaohs Sneferu and Khufu, right over here

in the 26th century BCE.

And we are still trying to get a better understanding

of how this was done.

We actually now don't believe

that it was done by slave labor,

but instead it was done during, you could say,

the off season by the peasants as a form of taxation.

Okay, you're done planting or harvesting your crops?

Well now that you have some time,

and this shows actually the importance of agriculture

for freeing people up, so to speak,

why don't you help the pharaohs built these massive tombs,

which I've seen various estimates

that it might have taken some place between

10 and 100,000 people several decades to build each.

But these are even today,

these were built over 4,500 years ago,

are some of the most iconic symbols

that humanity has ever created.

And the reason why we know so much about ancient Egypt

is that we have been able to decipher their writing.

It's a symbolic, they have these pictographs,

these hieroglyphics, I'm sure you've heard

of the word before,

and for a while we had no idea what they said.

We would see these encryptions in these tombs

and we had a sense that, okay these tombs,

especially things like the pyramids

would be for these great kings,

we could tell that it was a stratified society,

that nobility had better tombs than others,

but we didn't really have a good sense of what was going on

until we discovered this, which is the Rosetta Stone,

which was discovered in 1799.

The reason why this is so valuable

is it has the same text

written in three different languages.

It has it written in the hieroglyphs

of the ancient Egyptians,

and it has it written in a later script used in Egypt,

called demotic Egyptian, and most importantly,

it has it also written in Greek.

And so historians were able to say,

okay, we can now start to decipher what these symbols mean

because we have a translation of them

and that's why it's one of the first civilizations

where we're able to put the picture together.

And hieroglyphics are one of the first forms of writing.

But let's now go on in our journey

through thousands of years of ancient Egyptian civilization.

Between the old kingdom and the middle kingdom,

you have the first intermediate period

and then you have the middle kingdom

and then you have the Hyksos,

which are Semitic people,

Semitic referring to their language

being of the same family as Semitic languages like Arabic,

or Hebrew, or Aramaic.

But then you have the new kingdom,

and the new kingdom is considered to be the peak

of ancient Egypt.

It's really the height of their technology,

it's the height of their military capability.

And there are several pharaohs that are worthy of note

in the new kingdom.

The first is, he was born Amenhotep

or he was originally known as Amenhotep the Fourth

and then he eventually names himself Akhenaton

and Akhenaton means effective for Aton,

Aton being a significant Egyptian god.

And the reason why he changed his name is he decides

that, okay we have, the Egyptians have this huge

pantheon of gods.

Here is just the some of them right over here,

this is the god Osiris, often associated with the afterlife

or transition, regeneration, resurrection.

You have the god Amun here and his first name Amenhotep,

it means Amun is satisfied.

What is considered kind of the equivalent of Zeus,

you have the god here Horus

,

once again a very significant god

at different times in Egypt,

but what was interesting about Amenhotep the Fourth

or Akhenaton, whichever name you want to use,

is he decided, no, no, no, I don't like this pantheon,

this polytheistic religion that we have,

I wanna worship one god,

and the god that he decides to worship

is really the, you could consider it the sun god,

or the sun disc, and its representation looks

something like this and it was referred to as Aten

and so he changes his name to Akhenaton

and he actually starts to try to get rid of evidence

of these other gods or to make them a lot less important.

And so the reason why that's notable

is this is viewed as perhaps

one of the first attempts at monotheism,

at least within this ancient Egyptian civilization.

He's also noted for giving a lot of power to his wife,

to the queen, Nefertiti,

who some people say was second in command,

or even co-ruled alongside him.

Now he was also famous because after his death,

eventually, his son, King Tut, Tutankhamen, comes to power.

And the reason why King Tut, as he's often known,

although it's Tutankhamen, is known is because

we were able to find his tombs in relatively good order

and so he's become a popular part of the imagination.

And he's known as a child pharaoh.

He comes to power when he's very young,

he dies at 18 and so it's kind of an interesting story.

Now, most prominent amongst all of the pharaohs

across Egyptian history,

and this is also in the new kingdom,

comes a little bit after Tutankhamen,

is Ramses the Second.

And Ramses the Second, who emerges here in the 13th century,

and he rules for most of the 13th century BCE,

he represents really the peak of Egypt, ancient Egypt,

as a military power.

He's famous for the Battle at Kaddish,