POLITICAL HISTORY UNDER THE PHARAOHS

The ancient history of Egypt is usually divided 6 eras: the archaic period, the old kingdom, the first intermediate period, the middle kingdom, the second intermediate period and the new kingdom. E en before the beginning of the archaic period the Egyptians had taken some fundamental steps in the direction of creating an advanced civilization. Above all, they had begun to engage in settled farming they had learned to use cooper tools in addition to stone ones, and shortly before 3100 BC, they had developed a system of writing known as hieroglyphic. Expert are uncertain whether the Egyptians arrived at the idea of writing on their own, or whether the idea came to them from Mesopotamia. The strongest argument for the former position is that the hieroglyphic system is very different from Mesopotamian cuneiform, but the sudden appearances of hieroglyphic suggest that certain Egyptian administrator priest decided to work out a record keeping system on their knowledge of a foreign precedent. Whatever the case, writing surely allowed for greater governmental efficiency and apparently was a precondition for the greatest event in Ancient Egyptian political history, the unification of the north and the south.

RELIGION

The Egyptian priests alone were acquainted with the mystical or recondite sense of their mythology. Their religion appears to have been founded upon the worship of the supreme power of nature that is of one spiritual being , the author of the universe, adored under different names and forms, according to his different attributes and operations. The belief in supreme being seems to have been the grand of the priests.
Temple were the setting for the performance of a wide variety of cult actions that provided the basic structure of Ancient Egypt religion and the means of communication between the divine and the profane realms. Most cult actions took the form of offering rituals in which the king is shown giving the gods food, drinks, flowers, or any other gifts.
The performance of the temple cults rituals served several essential function. Most importantly, they were believed to maintain the cosmic and earthly order. Temple ritual also served as a place for legitimacy of the king, for all cult actions were done in His name and few with his exception. The importance of temple cult actions is evidence in their longevity. Offerings to the God can be documented through all periods of ancient Egypt history. Many of the specific rituals were unchanged for millenia, a reflection of the deeply conservative nature of the Egyptians.
This permanence of ritual actions reflects the Egyptians love and desire for repetition.
So, the main focus of the temple cults was the maintenance of the God who in the form of the cult statue, dwelled in the sanctuary of the temple. Because deities were patterned upon humans, they were believed to have the same fundamental requirements.
The Egyptian priests alone were acquainted with the mystical or recondite sense of their mythology. Their religion appears to have been founded upon the worship of the supreme power of nature that is of one spiritual being , the author of the universe, adored under different names and forms, according to his different attributes and operations. The belief in supreme being seems to have been the grand of the priests.
Temple were the setting for the performance of a wide variety of cult actions that provided the basic structure of Ancient Egypt religion and the means of communication between the divine and the profane realms. Most cult actions took the form of offering rituals in which the king is shown giving the gods food, drinks, flowers, or any other gifts.
The performance of the temple cults rituals served several essential function. Most importantly, they were believed to maintain the cosmic and earthly order. Temple ritual also served as a place for legitimacy of the king, for all cult actions were done in His name and few with his exception. The importance of temple cult actions is evidence in their longevity. Offerings to the God can be documented through all periods of ancient Egypt history. Many of the specific rituals were unchanged for millenia, a reflection of the deeply conservative nature of the Egyptians.
This permanence of ritual actions reflects the Egyptians love and desire for repetition.
So, the main focus of the temple cults was the maintenance of the God who in the form of the cult statue, dwelled in the sanctuary of the temple. Because deities were patterned upon humans, they were believed to have the same fundamental requirements.








Soon after the establishment of the Egyptian Empire, religion underwent debasement. He ethical of the religion was extremely largely destroyed and superstition and magic take control. The chief cause seems to have been bitter war to expel the Hykos fostered the growth of irrational attitudes and correspondingly depreciated the intellectual. They use the practice of selling magical charms, which were supposed to have the effect of preventing the heart of deceased from betraying his or her real character. They also sold formulas which were alleged to be effective in facilitating the passage of the dead to the realm of the blessed. The collection is referred as the Book of Dead.
Pharaoh Amenhotep, is the leader of this movement. After the some attempts to correct the most flagrant abuses, he resolved to crush the system entirely. He bring out the priest from the temple and hacked the names of the traditional deities from the public monuments and initiated it the worship of a new God.
More important than these physical changes was the set of doctrines that initiated by the reforming of pharaoh. He taught first of all a religion of qualified monotheism. Aton and Akhenaton himself were the God in existence. Like none other Gods before him. Aton had no human or animal shape but was to be known in terms of life-giving, warming rays of the sun. he was the creature of all and thus, god not merely of Egypt but of the whole universe.
A side of these qualification, Akhenaton restored the ethical quality of Egyptian religion as its best by insisting that Aton was the author of the moral order of the world and the rewarded of humanity for integrity and purity of the heart. The religion of Aton gained little popular following because of the masses remained devoted to their old God. The new religion was to strange for them and lacked the greatest attraction of the older faith. There after Egyptian religion was characterized by growing faith in ritualism and magic. Priests sold formulas and charms that were supposed to trick the Gods into granting salvation, thus even the cult of Osiris lost most of its moral quality.

ECONOMY AND SOCIETY

Throughout Egyptian history, the Nile has played a dominant role in the lives of the people. Its annual risings endowed the Egyptian year with a distinctive rhythm – inundation, planting, harvest, a fallow period or second cropping followed in the new inundation, repetitious and regular. The copious flow of the river’s waters deposited a new layer of topsoil yearly, enabling the land to produce the surpluses for which Egypt was already fabled before the arrival of the Greeks. From an aerial view, the Nile appears as shining stripes in the middle of a green fringe of the alluvial plains on either of the river’s banks, further distant from the river are the browns and yellows of the arid desert plateau and at many points behind them, mountainous regions. Year after year, the summer rains from the Ethiopian highlands and tropics rushed northward bringing the flood crest in the middle August and September.

The main pillar of Egypt’s economy has always been the arable farmland that depended upon the yearly inundation to lay down silt and fill catchment basins for water for irrigations. Pigeon droppings were collected for fertilizer from the dovecotes that peppered farming villagers. The strength of the inundation determined whether feast or famine would visit the land at the next harvest season, and an excessively high flooding that retarded the planting of new crops was as disastrous as one that failed to irrigate all the fields. Nilometers measured the levels of a flood from paranoiac times onward strategically placed at crucial points along the river.

ORIGIN

In proceeding to take a general view of the religious and political state of the Ancient Egyptian nation, our attention is first directed to the origin of their civilization, which we must ascribe to the aboriginal natives of Egypt alone. Thus again, we find obliged to opposed a commonly received opinion, which is that of the Ethiopian descent of the religion and arts of Egypt. This opinion has received the sanction of several learned men, in consequences of their not possessing that sufficient acquaintance with the monuments of Egypt, which can only be acquired by a visit to that country, and by the aid of the important lights derivable from the late discovery of the phonetic system of hieroglyphics.

The most ancient of all the monuments along the whole tract of country watered by the Nile from the furthers parts of Ethiopia to the Mediterranean are in northern Egypt. We elude all the pyramids of Memphis. The small pyramids of Ethiopia have been regarded as the types of those stupendous edifices of Egypt but they are proved by their hieroglyphics to be comparatively modern; which even their structure might lead one to imagine. The monuments of the next class in point of antiquity are found in the same part and there only. These are the edifices destitute of sculptures and of painting adjacent to the first and second pyramid. The monuments of the third class in the order of antiquity are in the same and other parts of Egypt and no monuments of the same age is found in Lower Ethiopia. These are the period of the last Memphis Dynasty and of the impoliteness kings of the 17th Dynasty. The most remarkable of them are the sculptured and painted tombs near the principal pyramids, the obelisk of Heliopolis in Middle Egypt.

Egypt began its march to civilization rather late compared with some regions of the Near East. Yet once it had taken root, the great civilization of the Nile proved to be the most durable of all, spanning more than three thousand years from the appearance of the first unified kingdom to the final eclipse of Ancient Egyptian culture in the early Christian era. For most of its ancient history, pharaoh ruled Egypt. Egyptology now tend to count the Macedonian and Ptolemaic dynasties as numbers 32 and 33 and they have added a 34th.