Ancient Egyptian Inventions Part 1

Greetings everyone! Welcome back to another episode of Bite Size History on History with Audrey D. In today's episode, we are going to be looking at part one of our ancient Egyptian inventions and focusing on the inventions that really are specific to the seven characteristics of civilization such as writing, art, and architecture, religion, and government. Now, we are also going to be looking through and seeing how each one of these lines up with those seven characteristics and how they probably impacted ancient Egyptian life. But before we get into the video, please make sure you're hitting that like and subscribe button if you are enjoying these episodes. Also, you can follow me on Instagram, TikTok, and you can support this channel through Patreon as History with Audrey D. Let's go ahead and get into our lesson on the ancient Egyptian inventions part one. First up, let's go ahead and take a look at our learning goal and our learning targets for today's lesson. Our standard is again going to be standard two, which is to describe the emergence of early civilizations. However, our learning goal for today is going to be summarize important achievements of Egyptian civilization. And our learning target is going to be to describe agriculture, calendar, pyramids, art, and architecture, hieroglyphic writing, record keeping, and literature such as the Book of the Dead. Starting out with the Book of the Dead, these are a collection of spells and magical formulas that were found in Egyptian tombs. These were compiled over a number of years. However, no tomb contains every single spell or formula. The reason for placing these in the tombs was to protect the occupant and help them in the afterlife. There have been multiple copies of these books found in Egyptian tombs, and like I said, no one book contains all of the funerary texts or chapters. Related to this are coffin texts. Now, the coffin texts were also included in the Book of the Dead, which are also Egyptian funerary texts that contain spells or magical formulas, which were painted on the coffins during the time frames of 2130 to 1630 BCE. This includes the era of the Middle Kingdom. This example of writing and literature is specific to Ancient Egypt and was most likely compiled in the 16th century BCE. Now, as we discussed in our last episode, hieroglyphics is the writing system of Ancient Egypt. It is a combination of pictures and sound symbols. Let's take a look at a few of these symbols and see what they represented and sounded like in the Egyptian language. As we can see in our current image, the types of sounds that are represented would not necessarily make sense in our modernized society. However, our first image is represented as hes. Then we have ka, also kaha with an h at the end of it, ket, ku, which we'll see represented in kufu, and ka again, but spelled a little bit differently and represented as a fish. Taking a look at some of the words that are actually created using these images, we can see that mu'u means ritual dancers. We can see that the three zigzag lines are mu, which means water, and we have mu'npet, which means water from heaven or rain. So all of these images are definitely a little bit different and it's different from what we would expect from modern day languages. We can see that kiosk is represented by the term kufu and protection is represented by ku. Fan is kuhu also. However, the representation of protection and fan are shown a little bit differently in the images. Our last image that we're going to discuss means to build, and that is kusi. And as we can see, this is actually represented in ancient Egyptian by several images. Record keeping became possible as a result of having a written language. Egyptians utilized record keeping to track successful agricultural years. Scribes were the primary record keepers in ancient Egypt, and they would record food stores, court cases, wills, tax records, magic spells, as well as the daily life of the pharaoh. Egyptians also invented black ink. Now, this ink contained lead, so it would last longer. Most likely, this ink was produced through the process of burning wood and oil and combining the ash mixture with water. The most common shades of ink used were black and red. However, shades of blue, green, yellow, and white have also been discovered in ancient Egyptian texts. Now, the lead found in the texts seems to be an outline on the lettering. Egyptians also invented paper out of the papyrus reeds that grew along the Nile. By drying out these reeds and flattening them, they made it possible to weave them into sheets of papyrus paper. This paper is what the majority of Egyptian documents were written on and helped to preserve them as well. We learned about the invention of calendars when we covered ancient Mesopotamian inventions. However, ancient Egyptians created a calendar of their very own as well. Egyptian calendars were based on the 365-day year. They had 12 months and three seasons. So, each month had 30 days and it was divided into three 10-day weeks. The other five days added to the calendar are actually the birthdays of five gods and goddesses, which include Osiris, Isis, Horus, Seth, and Nephthys. The three seasons included the annual flooding, known as the inundation, which is when the Nile overflowed and deposited silts on the agricultural land. The next season was known as going forth. This is the time when Egyptians began their planting season and the Nile receded from the farmlands. And the final season for ancient Egypt was known as the deficiency, which is when water was low and it was also time for harvesting crops. There were a variety of art forms in ancient Egypt that included reliefs, as well as sculptures and paintings. Art was actually considered to be something that was regimented and it stuck within a very specific theme or pattern throughout Egyptian history. Now, as we look at some of the images, we can actually see that the styles of carving and the styles of art are very similar to each other throughout the different eras of Egyptian history. And our final topic is going to be architecture. And with architecture, we are going to cover the pyramids. And we actually already covered a bit about the architecture of ancient Egypt when we discussed how the different homes were built. Egyptians built tombs known as pyramids to house the bodies of the pharaohs and their belongings. Construction crews spent years of hard labor to build each pyramid. And the challenges of building the pyramids actually led many engineering, mathematical, and technological discoveries. The Great Pyramid, built in the mid 2000s BCE for King Khufu, was the world's tallest structure for more than 4,000 years. Now, the Great Pyramid, which was built for Khufu, is close to 500 feet tall, which is the same height as a 48-story building. The Great Pyramid is the largest of the three pyramids at Giza, even though it looks smaller. To build the pyramids, the Egyptians had to invent a system of written numbers based on 10, as well as fractions which they used with whole numbers to add, subtract, and divide. This led to the invention of geometry, which we will discuss in a later episode. We'll go a little bit more into detail about the temples that were built to honor the gods, as well as the pharaohs in ancient Egypt, in a later episode as well when we discuss the mythology and religion of ancient Egypt. And that is it for Lesson 1 of Ancient Egyptian Inventions. In our next episode, we will be focusing on the inventions that have to do with technology and a stable food supply. I do hope you enjoyed this episode. If you did, make sure you are hitting that like and subscribe button, as well as that notification bell, so you get notified every time I put out a new lesson. You can also follow me on Instagram, TikTok, and Patreon as HistoryWithAudreyD, if you would like to support this channel on other platforms. Thank you so much for watching, everyone. I hope you have a fantastic day. I will see you in our next lesson.