Teaching Ancient Egypt (Part 3)

So in Part 1 we covered geography, pharaohs, pyramids and the Nile. Part 2 was all about the mummies. In part 3, we’re going to round out our lessons on Ancient Egypt by going over papyrus, clocks, hieroglyphics, and irrigation.

So thinking back to when we first talked about the Nile, this leads to several very important contributions from the Ancient Egyptians. First, the Nile would flood every year, depositing good soil on the banks of the river, allowing for farming. Those farms would then need water, so the Egyptians dug special ditches and would use those ditches to make sure water got from the Nile to their crops. This is something called “irrigation”. This is very important, because without water, there are no crops and without crops there is no food, and without food…well, people aren’t going to survive very long without a food source.

So along with the innovation of irrigation – the annual floods of the Nile did something else. People started noticing that the flood happened at regular intervals, and the Ancient Egyptians soon figured out that the cycle of the floods and seasons and such would reset every 365 days – or, every year. So the idea of the 365 day calendar came (sort of) from Egypt – after going through some changes via Julius Caesar and a Pope named Gregory. Here’s a real quick overview of the evolution of the calendar (leaving out a great deal of detail): most ancient societies (Egypt, Babylon, etc.) used a Lunar calendar, but this had the problem of not enough days to make a year. Egyptian priests started noticing particular stars that would appear at dawn on the horizon at certain points of the year, which they started to track, allowing them to “predict” the flooding of the Nile. This led to the movement away from the lunar year to a solar one – much closer to our modern consideration. Later, Julius Caesar had Rome adopt this calendar, and added in a day every four years to account for the extra time (as one revolution of the earth is actually 365 days, 5 hours, and some change). Later (like over 1,000 years later…) a small error in the Julian calendar is discovered, and Pope Gregory issued a ruling fixing it. thus arriving at our modern 365 day calendar plus Leap Years.

Back to Ancient Egypt. This wasn’t their only time-related innovation. They also created some of the first clocks. During the day, they used sundials – and the basic concept of those is that as the Earth moves around the sun, it causes the shadow cast by objects to change. By tracking this change, you are able to tell the time.

At night, the Egyptians developed a water clock – where a specially designed vessel was filled with water and dripped at specific intervals to tell the time.

There are more contributions from Ancient Egypt. A very important one, one that was used for thousands of years: papyrus. Papyrus is actually a plant that grows along the Nile River.

These plants were harvested, cut, then woven and flattened into shape creating what is, essentially, paper. In fact, we get the word “paper” from “papyrus” (note the similarities). Papyrus was the go-to paper for centuries, until parchment slowly replaced it starting in the second century – it wasn’t until around 500 AD that papyrus really went out of favor as a writing material.

But what did they write on the papyrus? A couple of things. The most famous style of writing to come out of Ancient Egypt is, of course, Hieroglyphics or hieroglyphs. These are pictures and symbols that represent words, sounds, or objects. The word “hieroglyph” is actually a Greek compound word – the word “hiero” means sacred and the word “glyph” means carving. Sacred carvings is a fitting description. The first of these hieroglyphs developed around 3000 BC/BCE and were carved into sacred objects, walls, tombs, and clay tablets. Eventually, this form of writing becomes the main form of writing for tombs, temples, and royal palaces. It is used to convey messages and as decoration.

Now, reading hieroglpyhs is tricky. One because the symbols do not just represent letters or sounds, like our alphabet does, but they can convey blends, ideas, whole objects, names, and many other things. In fact, the use of hieroglyphs fell out around 400 AD and the ability to read them was lost. It was lost until Napoleon’s jaunt into Egypt in the late 1700s/early 1800s. That was when a key discovery was made: the Rosetta Stone.

This stone has, quite frankly, not the most interesting inscription. It talks about the deeds and donations of the King at the time and says the priests promise to do things to honor the King (Pharaoh) since he was, according to Egyptian tradition, a god. But what the text says is less important than the fact that it was decreed in the text that the message should be inscribed in hieroglyphs, demotic (a sort of cursive form of hieroglyphs), and most importantly: Greek.

Now at the time the stone was discovered, no living person could read hieroglyphs or demotic script. But many people could read Greek. And so, with years of study and work, the code was finally cracked on reading ancient Egyptian.

Though Egyptologist can now (generally) read hieroglyphics, they still present a challenge. Hieroglyphs can be read left to right, right to left, bottom to top, or top to bottom. Sometimes the only way to tell how they are read is to find a cartouche. These look like rounded rectangles with a line on one end. Inside a cartouche is the name of a person. These make for a fun craft too – you can have your students write their names in hieroglyphs inside a cartouche as an art project/fun activity to go along with your lessons on Ancient Egypt.

And here ends our brief, very quick overview of Ancient Egypt. If you want some good notes for your students, check these out:

These are a set of notes – digital and print- that go over everything your students need to know about Ancient Egypt.

They are aligned to the VA SOLs (and have been updated to reflect the new changes to the 3rd grade Virginia SOLs.

You can also get the following, which has all sorts of activities and reading passages and even a craft with my Ancient Egypt Activity pack: