The ancient Egyptian civilization refers to the history from the first waterfall of the Nile River to the delta area, from the Tassa culture in 5000 BC to the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641 AD. The time frame for experts to actually discuss ancient Egyptian culture is from the first union of the northern and southern kingdoms of Egypt in 4245 BC to the occupation of Egypt by Alexander of Macedon in 332 AD and the collapse of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which is commonly said to have lasted three thousand years. Many years of pharaonic dynasty.
The writing of ancient Egypt
The evolution of the form of ancient Egyptian writing can be divided into four stages: 1. Hieroglyphics: the earliest ancient Egyptian writing material that we know of that constitutes the system. It is a hieroglyphic writing system that originated in 3000 BC. 2. Sacrificial script: For the sake of practicality and convenience, scribes simplified the symbols of hieroglyphs and created sacrificial script. 3. Secular script: It is the cursive form of sacrificial script. Compared with the sacrificial script, the connected form of the secular script is simpler and no longer has the characteristics of pictures. Its writing direction retains the tradition of the sacrificial script. Fixed from right to left. 4. Coptic writing: It is the last stage of development of ancient Egyptian writing and is deeply influenced by Greek and biblical literature.
Egyptian writing consists of three parts: ideographic symbols, phonetic symbols and qualifying symbols.
Ideographic symbols use graphics to express the meaning of words. The characteristic is that graphics are closely related to the meaning of words. For example: to represent water, draw a wavy line ≈, and draw a five-pointed star "★" to represent the concept of "star".
Phonetic symbols represent the pronunciation of words and obtain the phonetic value. For example: when the owl image is used as a musical note, it is pronounced as [m] and loses the meaning of "owl". The graphic symbol representing a door latch represents the [s] sound, while the other symbol representing a hillside is used to represent the [k] sound. The qualifying symbol is a new purely ideographic symbol added to the phonetic symbol and placed at the end of the word to indicate which category of things the word belongs to. The qualifying symbol itself is silent. For example: in hieroglyphs, the words "plough stick" and "red vulture" have exactly the same notes, both consisting of two consonants, and are pronounced hb. The way to distinguish the meaning of words is to add the qualifying symbols for "plough stick" and "red vulture" after hb respectively. A complete sentence can be formed by appropriately combining ideograms, phonetic symbols and qualifying symbols.
Religion in Ancient Egypt
Religion is the most important component of ancient Egyptian culture and runs throughout the entire history of ancient Egypt. There were four most important religious centers in ancient Egypt: Heliopolis, Memphis, Hermopolis and Thebes.
1. The relationship between gods and humans
The relationship between ancient Egyptians and gods can be summarized as follows: gods tell people what they should and should not do; Sin occurs because people violate God's will; those who do evil will eventually be repaid, and those who do good will be rewarded. The ancient Egyptians believed that divine guidance was achieved through the tongue and heart. Because the heart is the organ that makes decisions and plans, while the tongue makes decisions and plans public. These two organs play a decisive role in human behavior. God is the guide of these two organs and therefore the helmsman of life.
2. Creation Theory
The ancient Egyptians believed that the world had a beginning and no end. The world was originally chaos. After the creation and ordering of the Creator God, the world began to exist. The ancient Egyptians believed that everything goes in cycles and the world remains unchanged. The ancient Egyptians' view of time naturally focused on the future, because the endless world was waiting for them to enjoy.
3. The theory of the afterlife
The ancient Egyptians believed that life in this world mainly depends on two major elements: one is the visible human body, and the other is the invisible soul. The shape of the soul "Ba" is a bird with a human head and human hands. After a person dies, "Ba" can fly away from the body freely. But the corpse is still the basis of "Ba" dependence. To this end, a series of complex rituals must be performed for the deceased to make his various organs function again, so that the mummy can be resurrected and continue to live in the afterlife. The deceased needs a solid place to live in the afterlife. The pyramids of the Old Kingdom and the tombs excavated on the hillside during the Middle and New Kingdoms were the permanent residences of the dead. The ancient Egyptians believed that this world is temporary and the next life is eternal.
Weights and Measures in Ancient Egypt
The most important unit of length in ancient Egypt is the imperial cubit, which is the length from the cubit to the tip of the middle finger, which is approximately 20.62 inches. Represented in hieroglyphics as the forearm and hand, pronounced meh. The cubit is divided into 7 palms or 28 fingers, each palm equals 4 fingers. A square with a side length of one cubit, half of its diagonal (29.16 inches long), is called a remen, which can be divided into 20 fingers. It is the second unit of length and the main unit for measuring land. There is also a cubit, which is only 17.72 inches and is divided into 6 palms. The product of cubit times 100 is called khat, which is the basic unit for measuring land. The square of this length, 10,000 square cubits, is also a unit of cultivated land area.
The main capacity unit of the ancient Egyptians was henu, which equals 29.0±0.3 cubic inches, and 10 henus equaled one heqet. Various doublings are made based on times to form larger grain capacity units.
Another unit of capacity is the khar, which is equal to 2/3 of a cubic cubit, or equivalent to the capacity of a container with a diameter of 9 palms and a depth of one cubit. There is an approximate relationship between capacity and water, since one hanu of water weighs 5 debens. It seems that the unit of capacity is derived from the unit of weight of water. The debon is the weight of an anklet of the same name, and 1/10 of it is called a qedet, which is the weight of a ring.
Mummy
Mummy is a corpse that has been well preserved after special treatment. Over the course of more than three thousand years, the ancient Egyptians' methods of mummifying corpses changed a lot. However, most scholars and experts believe that the embalming method reached its peak around the 10th century BC. At that time, a first-class embalmer roughly followed the following steps to make a mummy: First, use a flint knife to make a ten centimeter long hole on the left side of the corpse's abdomen. From the incision, all other internal organs except the heart (which both the embalmer and his patrons believed to be the source of emotion) were taken out and washed one by one with wine and spices containing myrrh and cinnamon. The embalmer also flushed the abdominal cavity of the corpse with cedar oil to break down the remaining soft tissue, and then prepared to remove the brain. He used a hooked tool to penetrate the skull through the nostrils of the deceased, hooked out the brain inside, and then poured in cedar oil and spices. , flush out the remaining tissue in the braincase.
After every part of the body was thoroughly cleaned, the embalmer buried all the organs and the body in a pile of natron powder (a mixture of sodium carbonate and sodium bicarbonate) to drain away the water. The body and organs should be buried in sodium chloride powder for about a month. After taking them out, each part should be washed with perfume and spices. The embalmer must work carefully at every step of the corpse embalming work from beginning to end. For example, at the beginning, each finger of the corpse should be wrapped to prevent the nails from being damaged or falling off.
Then, the embalmer wraps the dried internal organs in linen one by one, puts them back into the abdominal cavity (or places them individually in clay or plaster jars), and uses fillers such as sawdust, linen, tar, or mud. Fill the abdominal cavity. After filling is completed, the incision is sutured immediately. Because some hair has been damaged by natron, some wigs must be patched up and braided together with the real hair that has not been taken off; prosthetic eyes also need to be installed in the eye sockets. The remaining work at this time is to restore the appearance of the corpse, which is also the most labor-intensive, because it is not easy to restore the shriveled corpse to its original appearance. Embalmers perform this ancient plastic surgery operation by carefully making many tiny incisions throughout the body and filling the skin with linen fillers molded to the contours of the body, just as plastic surgeons in the 20th century injected silicone into living people. Same as plastic surgery. Even the face and neck of the corpse were made to look like they were in life, and linen cloth was stuffed in the mouth to make the cheeks plump. Finally, the embalmer also acts as a make-up artist, using colored earth called ocher to dye the face and even the whole body of the deceased (male deceased are dyed red, female deceased yellow). After dyeing, the body can be wrapped. The embalmer wrapped the body's limbs in dense layer-by-layer layers of rosin-smeared linen cloth, then wrapped the head and torso, and finally wrapped the whole body. This wrapping work was slow and time-consuming. Several mummies have now been unwrapped, and the total length of the wrappings is more than two kilometers! The embalmer wrapped the body and made it into a mummy, which took about 70 days. The embalmer returned the mummy to the deceased, who probably had prepared a human-shaped coffin to hold the mummy and built a tomb.
The whole process of mummification is expensive. In addition to requiring various medicines, spices, evil spirits, amulets, etc., just wrapping a body sometimes requires more than 1,000 meters of high-quality linen. Therefore, only kings, their relatives, nobles and rich people can afford to spend money, while the poor can only do things simply or even hastily. Herodotus talked about two other cheaper methods of making mummies. Although it is difficult to ensure the integrity of the corpse, it can give some spiritual comfort to the poor. Moreover, perhaps it is precisely because of these cheap methods that mummies are made. The tradition can be spread and continued. It was not until after the 4th century AD when Christianity became dominant in Egypt that the practice of mummification was abolished.
In ancient Egypt, there was a group of people who made mummies as a profession. They mastered the skills and passed them down from generation to generation. In ancient Egypt, mummification and the production of related necessities undoubtedly formed a very important and large-scale industry system. The existence of this industry shows that the ancient Egyptians had mastered scientific knowledge in physics, chemistry, medicine and other aspects. The sodium oxide they used as a desiccant was, according to modern scientific analysis, a mixture of sodium carbonate, sodium bicarbonate, salt and sodium sulfide. This shows that the chemical effects of these substances were already known at the time.