History UsefulNotes / AncientEgyptianHistory

Seqenenre now attacked the northern kingdom, seeking to reunite the Two Lands under his banner--and failed. He appears to have run a brilliant campaign, using combined-arms operations on the Nile to devastating effect, but was defeated in a key battle. He was then captured and brutally executed, hands tied behind his back, by an axe-blow to his temple. The northerners also [[ThereIsNoKillLikeOverkill pierced his skull with a spear, beat his body with maces and clubs, and stabbed him repeatedly with daggers or small swords]]. His body, apparently still tied up, was then sent upriver to his family in Thebes for mummification and burial.[[note]]We don't have any direct written evidence of this, as the ancient Egyptians didn't like talking/writing about how anyone died. However, we ''do'' have Seqenenre Tao's mummy, which was found in the Valley of the Kings in Western Thebes, and it shows distinctive signs of this kind of execution-style death.[[/note]]\\

This extends to the name of Egypt itself, which derives from the Greek ''Aigyptos'' (via the Latin ''Aegyptus''). ''Aigyptos'' in turn appears to derive from the Greeks' best attempt to render "''Hwt-ka-Ptah''" ("Home of the Soul of Ptah"), a New Kingdom-era name for Memphis (originally applied to the city metonymically from the great temple to Ptah it housed); Memphis (which throughout Egyptian history was usually the largest and richest city of Lower Egypt, if not all Egypt, and the administrative center of everything from the Faiyum to the coast) appears to have been the main destination of the Mycenaean-era Greeks who traveled to Egypt for trade and diplomatic missions. To the Egyptians, their country was most usually called "Kemet", i.e. "the Black [Land]", referring to the black silt that made it so fertile, in contrast to "Deshret", i.e. "the Red [Land]", i.e. the desert all around the Nile Valley.[[note]]Confusingly, "Deshret" also refers to the [[CoolCrown Red Crown of Lower Egypt]]; while the crown was red, the land most assuredly was not. The confusion can be clarified inasmuch as "Deshret" means "the Red One"; whether one was speaking of the crown or the region would be clear from context.[[/note]] In certain contexts, however, Egypt was also called "Tawy", "the Two Lands",[[note]]"Ta" being Egyptian for "land", "-wy" being the Egyptian suffix for [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number) dual number]] in this context.[[/note]]. referring to the political union of Upper and Lower Egypt. It should be noted that we're not entirely sure about the actual name of Ancient Egypt. "Kemet" is an educated guess based on the letters K-M-T, so for all we know it might be Komet or Kamat or Kumat or whatever. [[note]] And even that isn't the whole story, as Egyptian writing that survives mostly reflects the "[[ClassicalTongue Classical]]" Middle Egyptian spoken during the Middle Kingdom. Modern reconstruction suggests that final "t" had been reduced to a "y"or vowel sound by the Late Egyptian of the New Kingdom, meaning "Kemet" could have been more like "Kemay" by then. [[/note]]

This extends to the name of Egypt itself, which derives from the Greek ''Aigyptos'' (via the Latin ''Aegyptus''). ''Aigyptos'' in turn appears to derive from the Greeks' best attempt to render "''Hwt-ka-Ptah''" ("Home of the Soul of Ptah"), a New Kingdom-era name for Memphis (originally applied to the city metonymically from the great temple to Ptah it housed); Memphis (which throughout Egyptian history was usually the largest and richest city of Lower Egypt, if not all Egypt, and the administrative center of everything from the Faiyum to the coast) appears to have been the main destination of the Mycenaean-era Greeks who traveled to Egypt for trade and diplomatic missions. To the Egyptians, their country was most usually called "Kemet", i.e. "the Black [Land]", referring to the black silt that made it so fertile, in contrast to "Deshret", i.e. "the Red [Land]", i.e. the desert all around the Nile Valley.[[note]]Confusingly, "Deshret" also refers to the [[CoolCrown Red Crown of Lower Egypt]]; while the crown was red, the land most assuredly was not. The confusion can be clarified inasmuch as "Deshret" means "the Red One"; whether one was speaking of the crown or the region would be clear from context.[[/note]] In certain contexts, however, Egypt was also called "Tawy", "the Two Lands",[[note]]"Ta" being Egyptian for "land", "-wy" being the Egyptian suffix for [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number) dual number]] in this context.[[/note]]. referring to the political union of Upper and Lower Egypt. It should be noted that we're not entirely sure about the actual name of Ancient Egypt. "Kemet" is an educated guess based on the letters K-M-T, so for all we know it might be Komet or Kamat or Kumat or whatever. [[note]] And even that isn't the whole story, as Egyptian writing that survives mostly reflects the "[[ClassicalLanguage Classical]]" Middle Egyptian spoken during the Middle Kingdom. Modern reconstruction suggests that final "t" had been reduced to a "y"or vowel sound by the Late Egyptian of the New Kingdom, meaning "Kemet" could have been more like "Kemay" by then. [[/note]]

This extends to the name of Egypt itself, which derives from the Greek ''Aigyptos'' (via the Latin ''Aegyptus''). ''Aigyptos'' in turn appears to derive from the Greeks' best attempt to render "''Hwt-ka-Ptah''" ("Home of the Soul of Ptah"), a New Kingdom-era name for Memphis (originally applied to the city metonymically from the great temple to Ptah it housed); Memphis (which throughout Egyptian history was usually the largest and richest city of Lower Egypt, if not all Egypt, and the administrative center of everything from the Faiyum to the coast) appears to have been the main destination of the Mycenaean-era Greeks who traveled to Egypt for trade and diplomatic missions. To the Egyptians, their country was most usually called "Kemet", i.e. "the Black [Land]", referring to the black silt that made it so fertile, in contrast to "Deshret", i.e. "the Red [Land]", i.e. the desert all around the Nile Valley.[[note]]Confusingly, "Deshret" also refers to the [[CoolCrown Red Crown of Lower Egypt]]; while the crown was red, the land most assuredly was not. The confusion can be clarified inasmuch as "Deshret" means "the Red One"; whether one was speaking of the crown or the region would be clear from context.[[/note]] In certain contexts, however, Egypt was also called "Tawy", "the Two Lands",[[note]]"Ta" being Egyptian for "land", "-wy" being the Egyptian suffix for [[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual_(grammatical_number) dual number]] in this context.[[/note]]. referring to the political union of Upper and Lower Egypt. It should be noted that we're not entirely sure about the actual name of Ancient Egypt. "Kemet" is an educated guess based on the letters K-M-T, so for all we know it might be Komet or Kamat or Kumat or whatever.

AncientEgypt was the second civilization in the world (after ancient [[UsefulNotes/{{Iraq}} Mesopotamia]]) to invent writing, with bits of proto-hieroglyphs being dated to the ''33rd century BC''. As a result, its history is ''[[TimeAbyss extremely]]'' long. People tend to forget this: Egyptian history from the earliest extensive records in the 31st century BC to the Macedonian Conquest in 332 BC spans ''2700 years''. To put that into perspective: For UsefulNotes/{{Jesus}} or [[UsefulNotes/JuliusCaesar Julius Caesar]], the first Egyptian kings were ''1000 years more ancient'' than either of them is to us; to the builders of the Pantheon in Rome, the Great Pyramid was older than the Pantheon is to the designers of today's skyscrapers. Even the Ancient Egyptian "golden age" of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Dynasties was as far removed from them as [[TheLowMiddleAges the Early Middle Ages]] are to us--the world of UsefulNotes/RamsesII was as far back for UsefulNotes/{{Augustus}} as UsefulNotes/{{Charlemagne}} is to UsefulNotes/BarackObama. Almost every tropes recorded in Ancient Egypt is therefore by definition OlderThanDirt, or at the ''very latest'' OlderThanFeudalism.