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August 26 - August 29, 2023
The people who lived along the Nile were called Egyptians. Early in Egypt’s history, there were two Egyptian tribes who lived along the Nile. The Egyptians who lived in the north, in the Nile Delta, were called the “Lower Egyptians.” The Egyptians who lived along the straight part of the river, further south, were called the “Upper Egyptians.”
The Egyptians used pictures to write with. We call these pictures hieroglyphs. The pictures stood for certain words. The Egyptians used to carve these hieroglyphs into stone tablets.
Sumer was in the Fertile Crescent, between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. This place between the rivers is called “Mesopotamia.” The word Mesopotamia means “between two rivers.”
The Sumerian picture-writing was called cuneiform. Because the Sumerians lived between two rivers, they had plenty of damp clay. Instead of carving their cuneiform onto stone, they would mold this clay into square tablets. Then, while the clay was still wet, they would use a sharp knife or stick to make the cuneiform marks. After the message was carved into the clay, the Sumerians could either wipe it out and write another message (if the message was something unimportant, like a grocery list), or else bake the clay until it was hard. Then the message would last for a very long time.
Egyptian paper was made from reeds that grew along the banks of the Nile. The Egyptians learned how to soften and mash them into a pulp. They would then spread the pulp out to dry in thin sheets. These sheets became reed-paper, which the Egyptians called papyrus.
We know a lot about Egyptian history from the times that Egyptians wrote on stone, because those stone writings have lasted for centuries—from Egyptian days until now. We know a lot about Sumerian history too, because clay tablets last for a long time if they’ve been baked hard. But we don’t know a great deal about what happened in Egypt after the Egyptians started writing on paper, because in the thousands of years that have gone by, the paper writings of the Egyptians have crumbled and disappeared.
The years after Jesus’ birth are called “AD” or “CE.” “AD” stands for Anno Domini, or “The Year of Our Lord” in Latin. “CE” means “Common Era.”
During the Old Kingdom of Egypt, the Egyptians began to make mummies for the first time.
Embalming was a very complicated process. Only priests—men who were in charge of worshipping the gods—were allowed to make mummies. And it took more than two months to make a mummy!
The Great Pyramid was built around 2550 BC/BCE. It was the highest building in the world for four thousand years. It was built with over two million blocks of stone—and each block weighs almost three tons.
Many people think that the Sphinx was built to protect the pyramids.
But Sumer wasn’t really one country. It was filled with villages of farmers. The villages grew larger and larger until they became cities. Each city built thick walls and high towers to protect itself. Each city had its own king and its own army. And the cities fought with each other all the time! We call them city-states because each city was like a separate country. The cities put all their energy into protecting themselves from their neighbors.
So he started to attack the cities all around him. He fought over fifty wars to conquer Mesopotamia. Eventually, Sargon ruled all the country between the Tigris and Euphrates rivers. He built a new capital city called Akkad, and named his new empire Akkadia. Now Sumer was united into one country under one ruler.
Around 1792 BC/BCE, a king named Hammurabi inherited the throne of Babylon from his father. Babylon was a city near Kish (the home of Sargon). At first, Hammurabi only ruled a small area of the land around his own city. But soon he began to conquer some of the smaller cities around him. He convinced the kings of other cities to swear allegiance to him. Soon he ruled over the whole southern part of Mesopotamia. This area was called Babylonia, after the city of Babylon.
Hammurabi didn’t want people to obey him just because his army was strong. He wanted his empire to be governed by just laws.
They called the time that it took the earth to go all the way around the sun one time “one year.” Then they divided this year into twelve months. They were the first people to divide a year into twelve months, just like we do today. The Babylonians were also the first to divide a day into twenty-four hours, and to divide an hour into sixty minutes.
Hammurabi was the most powerful king in southern Mesopotamia. But up to the north, another king was building another empire His name was Shamshi-Adad, and he didn’t want to be a fair ruler who made good laws. He just wanted to rule the whole world. Shamshi-Adad lived in a city called Assur. Babylon was in the south of Mesopotamia, next to the Euphrates River. But Assur was in the north part of Mesopotamia, beside the Tigris River.
Then Shamshi-Adad gathered his army together and set off to conquer the cities of Mesopotamia.
But the brothers bickered with each other. They wrote each other nasty letters. They complained about each other. They didn’t keep Assyria united and strong. Soon, Hammurabi decided that he wanted to make Assyria part of the Babylonian Empire. He marched up into northern Mesopotamia with his army. He destroyed the city of Mari, and he took over the city of Assur. Now the Assyrians had to pay tribute to Hammurabi, and call Hammurabi “King of the Whole World.” But Hammurabi wasn’t as cruel as Shamshi-Adad had been. He let some of the Assyrian leaders stay in charge of their cities, as long as
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Both the Babylonians and the Assyrians told stories about a great, mythical king named Gilgamesh. The story of Gilgamesh is one of the oldest fairy tales in the world!
The people of India also used a river as a road. Their river was called the Indus, and the land around the Indus River was called the Indus Valley.
Eventually, the people of India sailed out into the Arabian Sea. The Arabian Sea was the largest body of water they had ever seen! They must have thought that they were in a sea that had no shores and would never end. But they were brave; they kept exploring. Soon they learned that they could sail up to the cities of Mesopotamia and trade with them.
So the people of India—like the Mesopotamians—built large cities near the Indus River, and made money by trading with other cities. Today we call their civilization the Harappan civilization. It was strongest between 2000 and 1750 BC/BCE.
The people who lived in the Indus Valley built cities, just like the people in Mesopotamia. But there weren’t any empires in the Indus Valley.
The people of the Harappan cities stayed independent.
A farmer living in the Indus Valley had a different life from a farmer in Egypt or in Mesopotamia. He grew grain, but he also grew fruit, like melons, and cotton. And he used water buffalo and elephants to work his fields!
But something happened to the cities of the Indus Valley. Around 1750 BC/BCE, people began to leave their homes. Eventually, the cities were almost entirely deserted.
But these peaceful times didn’t last. The pharaohs of Egypt became weaker and weaker. They lost control of their armies. They even lost control of their own courts and temples. Priests and palace officials fought over who would be in charge. Egypt’s power started to vanish. For a little while, it seemed that Egypt might fall apart, just like the kingdom of Sargon did. But then, around 1991 BC/BCE, a new ruler came to the throne of Egypt. His name was Amenemhet. Amenemhet wasn’t a pharaoh—he just worked for the government. But he was determined to make Egypt strong again. He seized the throne
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battles against the Nubians, but finally he won. The Egyptians renamed Nubia “Kush.”
For the next seven hundred years, the Nubians were ruled by the Egyptians. Slowly, they began to think of themselves as Egyptians. They learned the Egyptian language and followed the Egyptian religion, and obeyed the Egyptian pharaoh. The Egyptians began to respect them. And they gained power of their own in Egypt. One Nubian woman even became the queen of Egypt, when she married the pharaoh Amenhotep III! Her name was Queen Tiye. And Queen Tiye wasn’t the only Nubian who moved into the palaces of Egypt. Eventually, the Nubians who lived in Kush founded their own dynasty—and became pharaohs of
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Amenemhet’s family was a powerful dynasty. Do you remember what a dynasty is? It’s when one family rules a country for many years. But after the dynasty of Amenemhet, other families ruled Egypt. The kings in these families were not good pharaohs! They couldn’t keep control over all of Egypt’s land. Once again, the priests and government workers started to quarrel with each other about who had the most power. There was no army that could fight off invaders. No one was really in charge.
Well, one of the strange wild tribes that lived in Canaan was called the Hyksos. They were warlike nomads who moved from place to place, looking for new land to conquer and new wealth to steal. They had been wandering around Canaan for years. A few at a time, the Hyksos had moved down into Egypt and settled. Now a huge number of Hyksos lived in the Nile Delta. There were so many Hyksos that they had an entire city all their own.
So the Hyksos defeated the Egyptian soldiers and captured the largest cities of Egypt. They even took over the pharaoh’s palace. From now on, the Hyksos were the rulers of Egypt. This was the end of the Middle Kingdom of Egypt. The Egyptians hated their Hyksos kings.
And they drove the Hyksos out of Egypt—using fighting methods that they had learned from the Hyksos themselves. The leader of the rebellious Egyptian princes, Ahmose, became the new pharaoh of Egypt. Under Ahmose and his descendents, Egypt became stronger than ever. Egypt got back the land it had lost to the Hyksos. And the Egyptian pharaohs used their new bows, chariots, and swords to conquer even more territory. Egypt became one of the most powerful kingdoms in the whole world. This time in Egyptian history is called the New Kingdom of Egypt.
After the Egyptians learned how to fight from the Hyksos, the New Kingdom of Egypt got more and more powerful. This is sometimes called the “Golden Age of Egypt,” because Egypt was richer than ever before.
Thutmose helped the Egyptian princes drive the Hyksos out of Egypt. When the leader of the Egyptian princes became king, Thutmose was his right-hand man. Then Thutmose married his daughter! And when the king died, Thutmose became the new pharaoh of Egypt. His rule began around 1524 BC/BCE.
Thutmose’s first battles were against the Nubians, who were trying to break away from Egypt.
Next, he took his army and followed the Hyksos all the way up to Canaan. He defeated the tribes living in the south part of Canaan and made the land part of Egypt.
He conquered land all the way to the Euphrates River. But he didn’t cross the river—because Babylon was ruling between the Tigris and the Euphrates. Thutmose knew better than to start a fight with Babylon. By the time Thutmose died, Egypt was twice as big as it had been!
Hatshepsut was a princess of Egypt—the daughter of a pharaoh. Her father Thutmose was one of Egypt’s greatest pharaohs. Thutmose had three children, but his favorite child was his daughter, Hatshepsut. Hatshepsut loved to listen to her father’s stories of battles and conquest. She wanted to grow up to be pharaoh too.
Hatshepsut’s brother got sicker and sicker, and one day he died. He had only been pharaoh for four years. Before he died, he told Hatshepsut that he wanted his son to be the next pharaoh. But his son was just a baby. So Hatshepsut said to the Egyptians, “I will help my brother’s son rule Egypt until he is old enough to be pharaoh on his own.”
“Then pretend I am a man,” Hatshepsut said. And she started to wear men’s clothing. Whenever she sat on the throne, she even put on a false beard. Hatshepsut was so determined to be pharaoh that the Egyptians finally agreed to have her as their ruler. For over twenty years, Hatshepsut ruled Egypt—a queen pretending to be a king. She didn’t fight any wars, but she did lead expeditions into Africa. There, she bought gold, incense, monkeys, elephants, and other things that the Egyptian people loved. She built more monuments than any other Egyptian queen. She ruled over the Egyptians until her
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Amenhotep was the first Egyptian monotheist. Monotheism means “worship of only one god.” He spent much of his reign worshipping Aten.
As long as Amenhotep lived, he kept the Egyptians from worshipping all their gods. But as soon as Amenhotep died, the Egyptians rebelled! They closed the temple to Aten. They reopened all their other temples. They went back to worshipping all the old gods of Egypt. And they erased Amenhotep’s name from all the monuments he had built.
Their favorite place to bury pharaohs was a long, rocky valley catacombed with caves and passageways. This valley, now called the Valley of the Kings, has sixty tombs in it. And the tombs are well hidden. Robbers never found King Tut’s tomb. As a matter of fact, no one knew it was there for thousands and thousands of years.
Over three thousand years later, a man named Howard Carter was working in the Valley of the Kings. He had spent years looking for the tombs of the pharaohs. He found Hatshepsut’s tomb.
All together, Jacob’s sons and their families made up a whole new nation. This nation was called “Israel.” The Israelites—the people of Israel—were unusual in the ancient world, because they were monotheists. They only worshipped one god, and they tried to obey his commands.
At first the Egyptians didn’t mind having the Israelites in their country. But then they saw the Israelite nation growing larger and larger.
So the Egyptians made the Israelites into slaves. They forced the Israelites to make the mud bricks that they used to build their houses and temples. The Israelites were not allowed to carry any kind of weapons. They had to work hard for no pay. But the Israelite nation kept growing bigger and bigger, and the Egyptians were still afraid. The book of Exodus, in the Bible, tells us the story of what happened next.
The Israelites walked from Egypt all the way back up to Canaan, where Abraham had once lived. They lived in Canaan for many years and became a powerful kingdom in their own right.
