Instruct: Given a question, retrieve relevant documents that can help answer the question.
Query: When did ancient Egypt begin?
The historical records of ancient Egypt begin with Egypt as a unified state, which occurred sometime around 3150 BC. According to Egyptian tradition, Menes, thought to have unified Upper and Lower Egypt, was the first king. This Egyptian culture, customs, art expression, architecture, and social structure was closely tied to religion, remarkably stable, and changed little over a period of nearly 3000 years.
The Late period of ancient Egypt ends when Alexander the Great took Egypt from the Persians without war around 332 B.C.
Today's use of the Ancient Greek rather than the Ancient Egyptian term came about during the Ptolemaic period, when the use of Greek was widespread in Egypt. The availability of Greek records on Egypt influenced the adoption of Greek terms by later historians.
For women holding office in the highest levels of the bureaucracy, one can cite Nebet, a Vizir in ancient Egypt during the Sixth dynasty of Egypt. It is necessary to recognize that a woman at such a high level of authority remained extremely rare and it was not until the Twenty-sixth dynasty of Egypt that a similar situation can be found. Women did, however, occupy numerous offices such as scribe in the bureaucracy, except during the New Kingdom, where all public bureaucracy posts were filled by men.
There are also several references to the separation of Egypt into two lands. Throughout ancient Egyptian history, even when the country is politically unified and stable, it is acknowledged that there are two areas: Lower Egypt, the area in the north including the Nile Delta, and Upper Egypt, the area to the south. In the beginning of the story, Bata is referred to as unique because there was "none like him in the entire land, for a god's virility was in him." Additionally, whenever one of the brothers becomes angry, they are said to behave like an "Upper Egyptian panther," or, in another translation, like "a cheetah of the south."
At about the same time, sundials were developed, likely marked first at noon, sunrise and sunset. In ancient Sumer and Egypt, numbers were soon used to divide the day into 12 hours; the night was similarly divided. In Egypt there is not as much seasonal variation in the length of the day, but those further from the equator would need to make many more modifications in calibrating their sundials to deal with these differences. Ancient traditions did "not" begin the day at midnight, some starting at dawn instead, others at dusk (both being more obvious).
Mainstream scholars reject the notion that Egypt was a white or black civilization; they maintain that, despite the phenotypic diversity of Ancient and present day Egyptians, applying modern notions of black or white races to ancient Egypt is anachronistic. In addition, scholars reject the notion, implicit in the notion of a black or white Egypt hypothesis, that Ancient Egypt was racially homogeneous; instead, skin color varied between the peoples of Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt, and Nubia, who in various eras rose to power in Ancient Egypt.
Ancient Egyptian mathematics is the mathematics that was developed and used in Ancient Egypt 3000 to c. 300 BC, from the Old Kingdom of Egypt until roughly the beginning of Hellenistic Egypt. The ancient Egyptians utilized a numeral system for counting and solving written mathematical problems, often involving multiplication and fractions. Evidence for Egyptian mathematics is limited to a scarce amount of surviving sources written on papyri. From these texts it is known that ancient Egyptians understood concepts of geometry, such as determining the surface area and volume of three-dimensional shapes useful for architectural engineering, and algebra, such as the false position method and quadratic equations.
The Passover Seder /ˈseɪdər/ (Hebrew: סֵדֶר [ˈsedeʁ] 'order, arrangement'; Yiddish: סדר‎ seyder) is a Jewish ritual feast that marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover. It is conducted throughout the world on the evening of the 15th day of Nisan in the Hebrew calendar (with a calendar day reckoned to start at sunset). The day falls in late March or in April of the Gregorian calendar and the Passover lasts for 7 days in Israel and 8 days outside Israel. Jews generally observe one or two seders: in Israel, one seder is observed on the first night of Passover; many Diaspora communities hold a seder also on the second night. The Seder is a ritual performed by a community or by multiple generations of a family, involving a retelling of the story of the liberation of the Israelites from slavery in ancient Egypt. This story is in the Book of Exodus (Shemot) in The Hebrew Bible. The Seder itself is based on the Biblical verse commanding Jews to retell the story of the Exodus from Egypt: "You shall tell your child on that day, saying, 'It is because of what the LORD did for me when I came out of Egypt.'" (Exodus 13:8) Traditionally, families and friends gather in the evening to read the text of the Haggadah, an ancient work derived from the Mishnah (Pesahim 10).[1][2] The Haggadah contains the narrative of the Israelite exodus from Egypt, special blessings and rituals, commentaries from the Talmud, and special Passover songs.
Ancient Egypt developed over at least three and a half millennia. It began with the incipient unification of Nile Valley polities around 3500 BC and is conventionally thought to have ended in 30 BC when the early Roman Empire conquered and absorbed Ptolemaic Egypt as a province. (Though this last did not represent the first period of foreign domination, the Roman period was to witness a marked, if gradual transformation in the political and religious life of the Nile Valley, effectively marking the termination of independent civilisational development).
Certainly, the literature of ancient Egypt did not hesitate to present women as frivolous, capricious, and rarely trustworthy. But despite this, women benefitted from a status that was rare in the civilizations of the time.
This passion for the queen is explained by the tumultuous life that she lived, full of intrigues, romances (her two most famous lovers being Julius Caesar and Marc Antony), her power, and her tragic death (she died by suicide). In short, she fascinates, by her life and by what she did. Through her connection to ancient Egypt, she has an aura of mystery for spectators, the same aura that surrounds ancient Egypt and its esoteric aspects, the same mysteriousness linked in the popular imagination with ancient curses of mummies, or other secrets of the tombs. Presented this way, Egyptian women become a sort of seductress, fascinating because of a romanticized view of her.
Egyptian astronomy begins in prehistoric times. The presence of stone circles at Nabta Playa in Upper Egypt dating from the 5th millennium BCE show the importance of astronomy to the religious life of ancient Egypt even in the prehistoric period. The annual flooding of the Nile meant that the heliacal risings, or first visible appearances of stars at dawn, were of special interest in determining when this might occur, and it is no surprise that the 365-day period of the Egyptian calendar was already in use at the beginning of Egyptian history. The constellation system used among the Egyptians also appears to have been essentially of native origin.
The hypothesis is regarded as a fringe theory. Mainstream scholars reject the notion that Egypt was a white or black civilization; they maintain that, despite the phenotypic diversity of Ancient and present day Egyptians, applying modern notions of black or white races to ancient Egypt is anachronistic. In addition, scholars reject the notion, implicit in the black Egypt hypothesis, that Ancient Egypt was racially homogeneous; instead, skin color varied between the peoples of Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt, and Nubia, who in various eras rose to power in Ancient Egypt. At the UNESCO "Symposium on the Peopling of Ancient Egypt and the Deciphering of the Meroitic script" in Cairo in 1974, the Black hypothesis met with profound disagreement. Nearly all participants concluded that the ancient Egyptian population was indigenous to the Nile Valley, and was made up of people from north and south of the Sahara who were differentiated by their color.
As further justification for colonial rule, the archaeological discoveries also shaped the way European colonialists identified with the artifacts and the ancient people who made them. In the case of Egypt, colonial Europe's mission to bring the glory and magnificence of ancient Egypt closer to Europe and incorporate it into knowledge of world history, or better yet, European history placed ancient Egypt in a new spotlight. With the archaeological discoveries, ancient Egypt was adopted into the Western historical narrative and came to take on a significance that had up until that time been reserved for ancient Greek and Roman civilization. The French revolutionaries justified the large-scale and systematic looting of Italy in 1796 by viewing themselves as the political successors of Rome, in the same way that ancient Romans saw themselves as the heirs of Greek civilization; by the same token, the appropriation of ancient Egyptian history as European history further legitimated Western colonial rule over Egypt. But while ancient Egypt became patrimony of the West, modern Egypt remained a part of the Muslim world. The writings of European archaeologists and tourists illustrate the impression that modern Egyptians were uncivilized, savage, and the antithesis of the splendor of ancient Egypt.
In Ancient Egypt the Bronze Age begins in the Protodynastic period, BC. The archaic "early Bronze Age of Egypt", known as the Early Dynastic Period of Egypt, immediately follows the unification of Lower and Upper Egypt, BC. It is generally taken to include the First and Second Dynasties, lasting from the Protodynastic Period of Egypt until about 2686 BC, or the beginning of the Old Kingdom. With the First Dynasty, the capital moved from Abydos to Memphis with a unified Egypt ruled by an Egyptian god-king. Abydos remained the major holy land in the south. The hallmarks of ancient Egyptian civilization, such as art, architecture and many aspects of religion, took shape during the Early Dynastic period. Memphis in the Early Bronze Age was the largest city of the time.
The Old Kingdom of the regional Bronze Age is the name given to the period in the 3rd millennium BC when Egypt attained its first continuous peak of civilization in complexity and achievement – the first of three "Kingdom" periods, which mark the high points of civilization in the lower Nile Valley (the others being Middle Kingdom and the New Kingdom).
The Hyksos, Asiatics from the Northeast, set up a fortified capital at Avaris. The Egyptians were trapped at this time; their government had collapsed. They were in the middle of an "enemy sandwich" between the Hyksos in the north and the Kushite Nubians in the south. This period marked a great change for Egypt's military. The Hyksos have been credited with bringing to Egypt the horse, the "Ourarit" (chariot), and the composite bow—tools that drastically altered the way Egypt's military functioned. (Some evidence suggests that horses and chariots were present earlier.) The composite bow, which allowed for more accuracy and greater kill distance with arrows, along with horses and chariots eventually assisted the Egyptian military in ousting the Hyksos from Egypt, beginning when Seqenenre Tao became ruler of Thebes and opened a struggle that claimed his own life in battle. Seqenenre was succeeded by Kamose, who continued to battle the Hyksos, before his brother Ahmose finally succeeded in driving them out. This marked the beginning of the New Kingdom.
When women in ancient Egypt are evoked, the first image that comes to mind for most is that of Cleopatra, or more precisely, Cleopatra VII. Although having a Greek origin, it is she who would be associated with the image of women in ancient Egypt, for several generations. This has been in large part due to modern cinema, especially the films of the Golden Age of Hollywood.
Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of eastern North Africa, concentrated along the northern reaches of the Nile River in Egypt. The civilization coalesced around 3150 BC with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under the first pharaoh, and it developed over the next three millennia. Its history occurred in a series of stable "kingdoms", separated by periods of relative instability known as "intermediate periods". Ancient Egypt reached its pinnacle during the New Kingdom, after which it entered a period of slow decline. Egypt was conquered by a succession of foreign powers in the late period, and the rule of the pharaohs officially ended in 31 BC when the early Roman Empire conquered Egypt and made it a province. Although the Egyptian military forces in the Old and Middle kingdoms were well maintained, the new form that emerged in the New Kingdom showed the state becoming more organized to serve its needs.
The First Dynasty of ancient Egypt (Dynasty I) covers the first series of Egyptian kings to rule over a unified Egypt. It immediately follows the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt, possibly by Narmer, and marks the beginning of the Early Dynastic Period, a time at which power was centered at Thinis.
Soon after the Sumerian civilization began, the Nile valley of Lower and Upper Egypt was unified under the Pharaohs approximately around 3150 BC. Since then, Ancient Egypt experienced 3 high points of civilization, the so-called "Kingdom" periods:
The history of Ancient Egypt is concluded by the Late Period (664–332 BC), immediately followed by the history of Egypt in Classical Antiquity, beginning with Ptolemaic Egypt.
Because knowledge of the hieroglyphs were lost from 6th century until 1822 when Jean-François Champollion deciphered the Rosetta Stone, the memory of ancient Egypt was that of an impressive civilization which built various monuments whose precise meaning had been long since been lost, limiting the extent of popular identification with it. Mohammad Ali the Great, the Albanian tobacco merchant turned Ottoman "vali" (governor) of Egypt and who ruled the country with an iron hand from 1805 until his death in 1849, had no interest in the ruins of ancient Egypt except as a source of gifts for foreign leaders. Likewise, Mohammad Ali had a permissive attitude towards Europeans taking ancient Egyptian relics with them, allowing much plundering of various sites such as by the Italian Giovanni Battista Belzoni while a diplomatic posting in Cairo was highly sought after owing to opportunities for looting. One of Mohammad Ali's officials, Rifa'a al-Tahtawi, persuaded him in 1836 to embark on preserving Egypt's heritage by ending the plundering of sites in Egypt and to create a museum to display Egypt's treasures instead of letting them be taken to Europe. Tahtawi later published a history of ancient Egypt in 1868, which took advantage of the discoveries of archaeologists and the deciphering of the hieroglyphs, which marked the first time that the heritage of ancient Egypt was used as a symbol of national pride in modern Egypt.   
Ancient Egypt was one of the world's first civilizations, with its beginnings in the fertile Nile valley around 3150 BC. Ancient Egypt reached the zenith of its power during the New Kingdom (1570–1070 BC) under great pharaohs. Ancient Egypt was a great power to be contended with by both the ancient Near East, the Mediterranean and sub-Saharan Africa. The empire expanded far south into Nubia and held wide territories across the ancient Near East. The combination of a fertile river valley, natural borders that made an invasion unfeasible, and a military able to rise to the challenge when needed, turned Egypt into a major power. It was one of the first nations to have a system of writing and large scale construction projects. However, as neighboring civilizations developed militaries capable of crossing Egypt's natural barriers, the Egyptian armies were not always able to repel them and so by 1000 BC Egyptian influence as an independent civilization waned.
Foreign artifacts dating to the 5th millennium BCE in the Badarian culture in Egypt indicate contact with distant Syria. In predynastic Egypt, by the beginning of the 4th millennium BCE, ancient Egyptians in Maadi were importing pottery as well as construction ideas from Canaan.
Women in ancient Egypt had some special rights other women did not have in other comparable societies. They could own property and were legally at court, equal to men. However, Ancient Egypt was a society dominated by men. Women could not have important positions in administration and were also excluded from ruling the country although there are some significant exceptions. Women at the royal court gained their position by the relationship to a male king.