Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt began around 3100 BC when Upper and Lower Egypt were unified under a single king - the event Egyptians themselves dated their history from, attributed to a ruler called Narmer or Menes and commemorated on a carved slate palette showing him wearing both crowns. The state that followed lasted three thousand years, longer than the distance between Cleopatra and the present, and its continuity is its most remarkable feature: the same script, the same gods and the same idea of a divine king responsible for maintaining maat, the cosmic order, survived repeated collapses. Historians divide it into three kingdoms separated by intermediate periods of fragmentation. The Old Kingdom built the pyramids at Giza and then broke apart when drought and provincial governors outlasted the central treasury. The Middle Kingdom reunified the country and expanded into Nubia. The New Kingdom, following the expulsion of the Hyksos rulers of the delta, made Egypt an imperial power in the Levant under Thutmose III and Ramesses II, and produced the religious experiment of Akhenaten, which his successors erased. Everything rested on the Nile's annual flood, which made agriculture predictable and made a centralised bureaucracy of scribes possible. Decline was slow and came from outside: Libyan and then Kushite dynasties, Assyrian invasion, two periods of Persian rule, and conquest by Alexander in 332 BC. The Ptolemies who followed were Macedonian but ruled as pharaohs. It ended in 30 BC, when Octavian annexed the kingdom after Cleopatra VII's death and made Egypt the personal property of the Roman emperor.

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