Let’s talk about Ancient Egypt!

First, I’d start with a collaboration board on Nearpod or a Jamboard or some other interactive board. In person, it would be a Know-Want to Know anchor chart. This lets the kids tell you what they already know about Ancient Egypt – which may be quite a lot. Expect to see that they had pyramids and mummies, maybe the word Pharaoh, maybe the word tomb, maybe the Nile or Africa.

Then I like to move into a video of some sort. For ancient civilizations, Rick Steves has some great videos that do a nice job introducing the ancient culture and, bonus, it’s kid-safe as long as you cut out any time he is eating/drinking, and you can usually find specific videos on youtube that only have the content you’re looking for.

Egypt doesn’t have as many good videos from good ‘ole Rick but there are a few. I also really like this video from Flocabulary. If you don’t have an account with them you can’t use it but it’s a good one. There are also quite a few Nearpod lessons in the library that are very good – especially the ones linked with NewsELA articles! (click here to explore the library on Nearpod)

Once you’ve got your kids nice and introduced to Egypt and activated all their prior knowledge, you can move into the geography. I always utilize Google Earth here – in person and online. Because if you want to hit home the idea that people settled along the Nile because it was where they could grow food, the satellite view really shows the idea that the area around the Nile is green and fertile and everything else is desert. Another random fact about the Nile if you want to tell your kiddos – it flows from South to North. So the Nile Delta and the area that empties out into the Mediterranean Sea is actually Lower Egypt, and further south is actually Upper Egypt.

This makes it easy to explain that the Ancient Egyptians lived along the Nile, and used its yearly floods and a system of irrigation – moving water from one area to another for farming – to farm the land along the river. They used the Nile like a highway – moving materials and trade goods down the Nile to trade with other cultures along the Mediterranean Sea.

If you want to stop here and talk about the Nile a little more, it’s pretty cool. You can tell them about the crocodiles that live in the swampy areas of the Nile as does the most dangerous animal in Egypt, the hippopotamus. According to data from the BBC, hippos kill an average of 500 people a year (that’s way more than lions or sharks). The kids will not believe you but it is totally, totally true. Hippos are very aggressive and extremely dangerous.

Now you can move into the government of Ancient Egypt. You can dive deep into the past and discuss the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt way back in the pre-dynastic days if you want, it’s an interesting time. I always start with the word Pharaoh. Most of them recognize that word but not always the meaning. So I always define it as a word for “King” in Egypt, but it grew to be much more. Early on, like in the Old and Middle Kingdoms, Pharaoh was considered a god and worshipped as such after death. By the time of the last Pharaoh of Egypt during the Ptolemaic era (around 30 AD/CE) Pharaohs were worshipped as living gods on Earth.

Side note: eras in Egypt are divided up into the following: Pre-Dynastic/Early Dynastic (around 3000 BC/BCE), Old Kingdom (around 2700 BC/BCE), First Intermediate Period (around 2200 BC/BCE), Middle Kingdom ( about 2000 BC/BCE), Second Intermediate Period (around 1700 BC/BCE), New Kingdom (about 1500 BC/BCE), Third Intermediate Period (about 1100 BC/BCE), Late Period (700 BC/BCE), Ptolemaic Egypt (around 300 BC/BCE). The kids don’t need to know this but it’s a good point of reference for anything you might read them.

Once they get what Pharaoh is, it is always fun to go over a few famous ones. Here are just a few and why they are famous: Ramses II “The Great”, ruled for around 60 years and had somewhere between 90-150 children with his many wives (which was totally okay for an Egyptian Pharaoh). Then you have Hatshepsut, Queen of Egypt and Pharaoh. She was the second woman to rule as Pharaoh (that can be historically confirmed) but the first to reign for an extended period of time and ruled successfully. To help cement that fact that she was a woman and also Pharaoh, Hatshepsut would wear the traditional Pharaonic beard that her predecessors all wore. Then you have Akhenaten, who tried to change all of Egypt’s religious beliefs to worshipping one god, the Aten. The people of Egypt weren’t very fond of this, and when Akhenaten’s son, Tutankhamun, took over, and restored the original religion and moved the capital back. Tutankhamun’s (also referred to as “King Tut”) rule would not have been remarkable except for the fact that Tut’s tomb was found nearly intact by Howard Carter in 1922. It’s famous because it is the most intact tomb every found in the Valley of the Kings. I mean, Egyptologist get excited to find one sealed chamber in a large tomb, finding one with almost all of its grave goods and a sealed sarcophagus was an astounding discovery. It held between 3,000-5,000 grave goods, many made out of gold or other precious metals and stones. Finally, Cleopatra VII. Yes, that Cleopatra of Julius Caesar/Marc Antony fame. Cleopatra was ethnically Greek (there is a small chance that one grandparent might have been Egyptian but the rest were certainly Greek). She was the last of the Ptolemaic Pharaohs who rose to power after Alexander the Great conquered Egypt around 330 BC/BCE. Cleopatra was actually the first member of her dynasty to speak Egyptian – the rest had spoken Macedonian Greek. According to sources, she was a clever, intelligent politician, and managed to keep Egypt and Rome’s relationship relatively peaceful. For a time. After Caesar was assassinated, Cleopatra sided with Antony and Octavian. When war broke out between the two men, Cleopatra sided with Antony, and when he lost, she (according to legend) committed suicide by snake bite. Upon her death, Egypt became a province of Rome and the Pharaohs were no more.

You can probably leave out some of the juicier details of Cleopatra’s life – they’re kids after all. But she’s a pretty interesting figure.

Next up: buildings.

Now the most famous buildings in Ancient Egypt (possibly some of the most famous structures ever in the world) are the Pyramids of Giza. There’s actually way more than three and only one is called the “Great Pyramid” but regardless of all that, they’re pyramids, they’re huge, and they’re super old. Want to blow some minds? Cleopatra lived closer to the invention of the cell phone than she did to the construction of the pyramids. They’re about 4,500 years old. They’re also the oldest and only remaining wonder from the seven wonders of the Ancient World.

The pyramids were the tombs of Pharaohs in Egypt’s Old Kingdom. The largest pyramid, the “Great Pyramid” is the Pyramid of Khufu. The second largest (but the one that looks the biggest because its location) is the Pyramid of Khafre. It’s the only one with any of the limestone casing (outer layer/decoration) left – the other two have had all of theirs stripped for use in other construction projects over the last 4,000 years. The “smallest” of the three (I mean, it’s still HUGE) is the Pyramid of Menkaure. (By the way, Menkaure was the son of Khafre who was the son of Khufu – the pyramids were a family affair way back in the Old Kingdom). Oh, and while he was at ordering his pyramid built, Khafre also ordered the construction of the Great Sphynx, which is a half-man, half-lion structure cut out of bedrock. (thought this fact is debated and not…set in stone) Sorry. Dad joke. Had to do it.

The Egyptians built many other palaces and temples and tombs, but they did move many of the Pharaonic tombs to a more out-of-the-way Valley of the Kings to prevent grave robbers. The pyramids were kind of a “rob me” sign and easy to find. Tombs dug into a valley were a little more difficult, however, almost all Egyptian tombs were robbed within a few years of the burial of a Pharaoh – sometimes by the Pharaoh’s successors because they needed gold. Hence why the discovery of Tut’s tomb was such an amazing find.

We’ll get into more about Egypt in the next blog post – I’ve still got contributions to cover and, of course, MUMMIES!

Need some notes and activities for your class for Ancient Egypt? Click this link to go to that section of my TPT store!