Ancient Egypt

Ancient Egypt was a civilization of ancient North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in the place that is now the country Egypt. Ancient Egyptian civilization followed prehistoric Egypt and coalesced around 3100 BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology) with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under Menes (often identified with Narmer). The history of ancient Egypt occurred as a series of stable kingdoms, separated by periods of relative instability known as Intermediate Periods: the Old Kingdom of the Early Bronze Age, the Middle Kingdom of the Middle Bronze Age and the New Kingdom of the Late Bronze Age.

• [In the 7th century BC] the past was supreme; the priest who cherished it lived in a realm of shadows, and for the contemporary world he had no vital meaning.
  • J. H. Breasted, A History of Egypt (1905) ch. 27

• The limits of the dominion of the Egyptian gods had been fixed as the outer fringes of the Nile valley long before the outside world was familiar to the Nile-dwellers; and merely commercial intercourse with a larger world had not been able to shake the tradition. Many a merchant had seen a stone fall in distant Babylon and in Thebes alike, but it had not occurred to him, or to any man in that far-off age, that the same natural force reigned in these widely separated countries.
  • J. H. Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912) ch. 9

• It was universalism expressed in terms of imperial power which first caught the imagination of the thinking men of the Empire, and disclosed to them the universal sweep of the Sun-god’s dominion as a physical fact. Monotheism is but imperialism in religion.
  • J. H. Breasted, Development of Religion and Thought in Ancient Egypt (1912) ch. 9

• Egypt! from whose all dateless tombs arose
  Forgotten Pharaohs from their long repose,
  And shook within their pyramids to hear
  A new Cambyses thundering in their ear;
  While the dark shades of forty ages stood
  Like startled giants by Nile's famous flood.
  • Lord Byron, The Age of Bronze, st. 5 (1823) p. 11

• When brutes were deified,
  And Memnon in the sunrise sprang and cried,
  And love-winds smote Bubastis, and the bare
  Black breasts of carven Pasht received the prayer
  Of suppliants bearing gifts from far and wide!
  • Edmund Gosse, "On a Lute Found in a Sarcophagus", On Viol and Flute (1873) p. 104

• Encyclopedic article on Ancient Egypt on Wikipedia