Key figures of ancient Egypt

When was ancient Egypt, and what defined it

Egypt's history is counted in dynasties, a system that goes back to the priest Manetho, who wrote a history of Egypt in Greek around 280 BCE. Modern historians group the thirty-odd dynasties into periods. All dates before about 700 BCE are approximate, and different reference books differ by a few decades.

Three things held this long history together. The Nile, whose yearly flood watered a narrow strip of farmland in a desert, made Egypt rich and easy to unite. Kingship: the pharaoh was the link between gods and people, responsible for keeping order (maat) against chaos. And writing and religion: hieroglyphs carved on temples and tombs, papyrus documents, and a belief in an afterlife that produced mummies, tombs and texts such as the Book of the Dead. The Great Pyramid, built around 2560 BCE for Khufu, was the tallest human-made structure on Earth for nearly four thousand years. Excavations of the workers' town at Giza suggest it was built by organised, fed and housed labour gangs, not by enslaved armies as older films show.

The New Kingdom rulers: Hatshepsut, Nefertiti and Ramesses II

Hatshepsut (ruled about 1479 to 1458 BCE) was the daughter of Thutmose I and wife of her half-brother Thutmose II. When he died she became regent for her young stepson, Thutmose III, and within about seven years had herself crowned king, ruling alongside him as the senior partner. Her statues show her with the king's headcloth and false beard. Her reign was largely peaceful and prosperous: reliefs in her terraced temple at Deir el-Bahri show a trading expedition to the land of Punt, probably on the Red Sea coast of Africa, bringing back myrrh trees, ebony and gold. Late in Thutmose III's reign, about twenty years after her death, many of her images were chiselled away. Historians now read this as a political move to tidy up the line of succession rather than personal hatred.

Nefertiti (about 1370 to about 1330 BCE) was the Great Royal Wife of Akhenaten, who ruled about 1353 to 1336 BCE and tried to replace Egypt's many gods with the worship of one, the Aten or sun disc. The couple built a new capital, Akhetaten (modern Amarna), and art from it shows Nefertiti with unusual power: making offerings to the Aten and even striking down enemies, a pose normally kept for kings. None of her own words survive. An inscription published in 2012 shows she was still queen in Akhenaten's sixteenth year, and some Egyptologists think she later ruled as pharaoh under another name; others disagree. Her painted limestone bust, found by a German expedition at Amarna in 1912, is in the Neues Museum in Berlin, and Egypt has asked for its return. Tutankhamun, probably Akhenaten's son by another wife, restored the old gods.

Ramesses II (about 1303 to 1213 BCE) reigned for 66 years, from 1279 to 1213 BCE. In about 1274 BCE he fought the Hittite army at Kadesh in Syria. He had the battle carved on temple walls across Egypt as a great victory in which he charged the enemy almost alone, but the result was at best a draw. Around 1259 BCE he made a peace treaty with the Hittites that survives in both an Egyptian version at Karnak and a Hittite version on clay tablets, one of the earliest peace treaties whose text we have. He built on a colossal scale, including the temples at Abu Simbel, which were cut into blocks and moved uphill between 1964 and 1968 to save them from the waters of the Aswan High Dam. He had more than a hundred children. No Egyptian source links him to the biblical Exodus.

The Greek historian Diodorus later recorded an inscription on one of his statues, which inspired Percy Bysshe Shelley's sonnet:

Greek Alexandria: Alexander, Euclid and Hypatia

Alexander the Great (356 to 323 BCE) took Egypt from the Persians in 332 BCE without a fight, visited the oracle of Amun at the Siwa oasis, and in 331 BCE founded Alexandria on the Mediterranean coast. After his death his general Ptolemy took Egypt, and Ptolemy's descendants ruled for nearly three centuries as pharaohs to Egyptians and as Greek kings to Greeks. They founded the Museum, a research institute, and the great Library. The Rosetta Stone (196 BCE), a decree of Ptolemy V written in hieroglyphs, demotic and Greek, is the key that let Jean-François Champollion decipher hieroglyphs in 1822.

Euclid (active about 300 BCE) worked in Alexandria under the first Ptolemy. His Elements, thirteen books of geometry and number theory proved step by step from a few definitions and postulates, became one of the most copied textbooks in history. Almost nothing is known of his life; the story that he told the king there is “no royal road to geometry” was written down by Proclus some seven centuries later.

Hypatia (about 355 to 415 CE) lived when Egypt was a province of the Roman Empire and Alexandria a largely Christian city. Daughter of the mathematician Theon, she taught Plato, Aristotle, mathematics and astronomy to students of different faiths, and helped her father edit a commentary on Ptolemy's astronomy. In March 415 she was murdered by a Christian mob during a political feud between the city's prefect, Orestes, and its bishop, Cyril. Popular stories that link her to the burning of the Great Library are myths: the Library declined over centuries.

Cleopatra VII, the last Ptolemaic ruler, belongs between Euclid and Hypatia. Plutarch says she was the first of her Greek-speaking dynasty to learn the Egyptian language. After her defeat with Mark Antony at Actium in 31 BCE and her death in 30 BCE, Egypt became a Roman province. See key figures of ancient Rome.

Ancient Egypt timeline

Big themes and debates

• Propaganda in stone. Pharaohs carved what they wanted remembered. Ramesses' Kadesh inscriptions and Hatshepsut's divine-birth reliefs are statements of power. Compare them with the Hittite side or with what the reign actually achieved.
• Women and power. Hatshepsut ruled as king, Nefertiti may have, and Cleopatra VII did. But they were exceptions in a system built for male kings, and Hatshepsut had to present herself in male form.
• Who built the pyramids? Archaeology at Giza points to skilled crews and rotating labourers who were fed and housed. The image of whipped slaves comes from much later stories and films.
• Whose Egypt? Ancient Egypt was an African civilisation with its own population, in contact with Nubia, the Levant and the Mediterranean. Modern arguments about the skin colour of ancient Egyptians often say more about modern politics than ancient evidence; most scholars stress a diverse population that varied from north to south.
• Who owns the past? The Nefertiti bust in Berlin, the Rosetta Stone in London and many mummies abroad are at the centre of debates about returning objects to Egypt.

Primary sources to read and see

• The Punt reliefs and divine-birth reliefs in Hatshepsut's temple at Deir el-Bahri (photographs and translations are widely published).
• The Great Hymn to the Aten, from the tomb of Ay at Amarna, attributed to Akhenaten.
• The Amarna Letters: about 350 clay tablets of diplomatic letters between Egypt and other kingdoms, found in 1887.
• The Kadesh Poem and the Egyptian and Hittite peace treaty: read Ramesses' version, then the treaty, and spot the difference in tone.
• Herodotus, Histories, Book 2 (about 430 BCE): a Greek visitor's mix of good observation and tall tales about Egypt.
• The Rosetta Stone (British Museum): the Greek section in translation.
• Euclid, Elements, Book I, and the account of Hypatia in Socrates Scholasticus, Ecclesiastical History 7.15 (about 439 CE).

How to study ancient Egypt: projects

• Kadesh from both sides. Write two news reports of the battle, one from Ramesses' inscriptions and one from what the peace treaty implies, then decide which is closer to the truth.
• Who erased Hatshepsut? Lay out the evidence (when the images were attacked, which ones, and what Thutmose III did in his early reign) and test the revenge theory against the succession theory.
• Write your name in hieroglyphs using the uniliteral signs, then look at how Champollion used royal names in cartouches to crack the script.
• A museum debate on whether the Nefertiti bust should go back to Egypt, with each side using the 1913 division of finds and modern laws.
• Interview a pharaoh. Write questions for Hatshepsut about power and image and practise by voice with Hatshepsut on Yuga. The recreation is built from her inscriptions and the archaeological record, which say little about her personality, so it is not her and can be wrong. Cite the inscriptions, not the app.