Ancient Egypt ran for three thousand years, long enough that Cleopatra lived closer to us than to the builders of the Great Pyramid. These stories cover the rulers and the monuments, but also the ordinary business of the place: the ten-day week, the sick notes, the first recorded strike, and the digging that keeps turning up things nobody expected.
Every tile in a Ancient Egypt game carries one of these. Open one to read it now, or leave them for the board to hand you.
Pharaohs
nine stories
1One king, two crowns, carved at the very start
On the tile: Narmer Palettec. 3100 BC
A carved stone slab a little over two feet tall was buried in a temple at Nekhen, the place the Greeks called Hierakonpolis. British archaeologists Quibell and Green dug it out in the 1897-98 season. On one face King Narmer wears the white crown of Upper Egypt and swings a mace. On the other he wears the red crown of Lower Egypt. Two crowns, one king, and some of the earliest hieroglyphs anyone has found.
Khufu ordered the Great Pyramid at Giza. The only complete sculpture of him anyone has found is an ivory figure 7.5 centimeters tall, about the height of a thumb, dug up at Abydos by Flinders Petrie's excavators in the early 1900s. It came out of the ground without its head. Petrie's report says the head was recovered only after three weeks of sifting the earth. The king sits on a throne in the red crown of Lower Egypt.
Sobekneferu closed out the Twelfth Dynasty as a woman holding the throne. A fragment of her statue in the Louvre, 48 centimeters of silicified sandstone, shows how her sculptors squared that circle: a woman's sheath dress, and over it the triangular kilt and the striped nemes headcloth that only a pharaoh wore. The head is gone. The one thing the statue cannot tell us is what face she chose to give herself.
Hatshepsut ruled as king rather than queen, and her sculptors had to show that in stone. A granite sphinx from her temple at Deir el-Bahari gives her a lion's body, the striped nemes headcloth, the rearing cobra at the brow, and a false beard attached to her chin. All of it is standard royal equipment. The beard was a badge of office, not a disguise. Her successor's men later smashed the statue but left her name and titles on it intact.
Around April of 1457 BC, Thutmose III marched from Thebes on Megiddo in Canaan and chose to approach through a narrow pass rather than by either of the easier roads, coming out behind the enemy line. What makes the campaign unusual is the paperwork. His military scribe Tjaneni kept a journal of it, and the king liked the account enough to have long stretches carved on the walls of the temple of Amun at Karnak. The siege that followed ran seven or eight months.
Amenhotep III had hundreds of large scarab-shaped seals carved with short announcements about himself, then sent copies around Egypt and well beyond it, as far as Syria and Sudan. One type keeps a running tally: in the first ten years of his reign the king shot 102 lions with his own bow and arrow. Whether anybody counted the lions is another matter. The scarabs are scattered through museums now, and Liverpool alone holds three.
By his fifth year on the throne, Amenhotep IV had renamed himself Akhenaten, a name declaring him effective for the Aten, and he announced a new city on empty ground between Memphis and Thebes. Akhetaten, the Horizon of the Aten, was laid out for a single god shown as a sun disk whose rays end in small hands. He reigned seventeen years. Afterward the court left, the stone buildings were pulled down and carried away, and later king lists dropped his name.
Ramesses II reigned so long that the succession kept dying out beneath him. His eldest son and crown prince, Amenherkhepshef, died without ever inheriting. Khaemwaset, the son who restored old monuments at Saqqara, died around 1225 BC at about fifty-six. When Ramesses himself died about 1213 BC at roughly ninety, the crown went to Merneptah, his thirteenth son, who was already about sixty and had spent almost his whole life waiting in the wings.
For almost a century, Egypt answered to the Kushite kings of Nubia, upriver in what is now Sudan. The best known of them is Taharqa, a pharaoh of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty in the seventh century BC. He was not buried among the Egyptian kings. His tomb is the first at the royal cemetery of Nuri, under a pyramid of its own. Sudan holds more than two hundred ancient pyramids today, more than Egypt has.
Egyptian kings had been buried under low rectangular tombs called mastabas. At Saqqara, the builders working for King Netjerykhet, better known as Djoser, stacked six mastabas one on another, each smaller than the last. Egypt's antiquities ministry calls the result both the first pyramid the Egyptians ever built and the oldest known ancient Egyptian stone structure. The architect credited with the leap is Imhotep, a name that outlasted almost everyone else's.
At Meidum, Sneferu's workers built a seven-step pyramid, enlarged it to eight steps, then turned it into a true pyramid with smooth sides, 92 to 95 meters tall. What stands there now is a three-step tower rising out of an enormous mound of its own debris. The dramatic story is a sudden collapse. The debris lies in distinct layers, which points instead to slow ruin over a very long time.
Sneferu's pyramid at Dahshur starts climbing at about 55 degrees and then, partway up, eases back to 43 and finishes at the gentler slope. Egypt's antiquities ministry says the builders were forced into it by an overload of blocks that left the structure unstable. Most buildings hide their mistakes. This one wears the correction on the outside, a change of plan frozen into the outline of a mountain of stone.
Khufu's pyramid rose about 146.5 meters, and Egypt's antiquities ministry states that it stayed the tallest structure in the world for 3,800 years. That span is hard to feel from inside it. Cleopatra, the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, held the throne from 51 to 30 BC, which puts her closer in time to the present day than to the men who set these blocks. The pyramid was already more than two thousand years old when she took the throne.
The Great Sphinx was carved out of the bedrock at Giza in the reign of Khafre, runs about 73 meters long and 20 meters high, and is missing its nose. The favorite explanation is a cannonball from Napoleon's troops. Eighteenth-century drawings made before Napoleon's army ever reached Egypt already show the face without a nose. Older accounts blame a Sufi with a chisel who took the statue for an idol, hundreds of years before Napoleon was born.
Karnak is less a building than a construction site that never closed. Egypt's antiquities ministry traces work there from the reign of Intef II, around 2100 BC, down to the Ptolemaic period, with Romans still adding pieces afterward. Its Great Hypostyle Hall is a forest of 134 stone columns standing 15 meters tall, except for the central twelve, which stand 21. Seti I and his son Ramesses II did most of that hall.
In a granite quarry at Aswan lies an obelisk its makers never got out of the ground. Finished, it would have stood around 42 meters and weighed 1,168 tonnes, taller than any other ancient Egyptian obelisk. It was probably ordered by Hatshepsut for the temple of Amun at Karnak. Fissures opened in the granite, the work stopped, and the quarrymen walked away, leaving the scalloped trenches they had pounded around it with dolerite.
Thutmose III set out to scrub Hatshepsut from Egypt's monuments. At Karnak her image and her cartouche were chiseled off shrine walls, and the inscriptions on her obelisks were covered over with stone. Covering, it turns out, is not destroying. Shut away from wind and blown sand for centuries, the texts underneath came through in pristine condition. The erasure ended up preserving exactly the thing it was meant to remove.
Ramesses II had the temple at Abu Simbel cut into the living rock of a cliff around 1264 BC, which makes it an awkward thing to move. When the Aswan High Dam threatened to drown it, an international effort led by UNESCO moved it anyway. Crews with wire saws sliced the temples into more than a thousand numbered blocks and rebuilt them inside an artificial cliff 64 meters higher, finished in 1968. On February 22 and October 22 the sun still reaches down the main hall to the statues at the back.
Papyrus cost money, so Egyptians wrote everyday things on broken pottery and flakes of limestone. These scraps, called ostraca, are where ordinary life survives. One limestone piece from around 1250 BC holds a 280-day attendance record for a work crew. At Athribis, a team from the University of Tübingen has recovered more than 40,000 of them: tax lists, delivery notes, priestly certificates and schoolchildren's exercises.
Deir el-Medina housed the craftsmen who cut the royal tombs, and the village kept records. Almost a third of the absences noted down were because a workman was too sick to work, and the monthly grain ration went out to him regardless. The crew also had a physician of its own, a swnw, paid by the state and given time off to prepare remedies. The state even rationed out common medical ingredients for the men to share.
In the twenty-ninth year of Ramesses III, the grain rations for the royal tomb crew stopped arriving. The scribe Amunnakht wrote down what happened next: the men passed the control post shouting that they were hungry, then sat down behind a royal funerary temple. The grain came, they walked out again, and this time they refused to go home until their words were written down for the vizier and the pharaoh. The Egyptian Museum in Turin, which holds the papyrus, calls it the first documented labor strike in history.
Senet was played on thirty squares in three rows of ten, with throwing sticks instead of dice, and the evidence for it goes back to about 3100 BC. Over the centuries the game picked up a second meaning. Its squares came to stand for gods and hazards of the netherworld, and the last square for the sun god himself, so that finishing the game acted out a worthy soul arriving safely and joining him for eternity.
Egyptian blue was not dug out of the ground. It was made, around 3100 BC, by firing silica, copper, calcium and a sodium salt together at high heat, which makes it the earliest synthetic pigment known. It has an odd second life in the laboratory. Lit with visible light, it glows in the near-infrared, so a modified camera can pick out grains of the pigment on ancient objects where nothing blue is left for the eye to see.
Egyptian kohl was not simply soot. Analysis found lead salts in it, and lead is toxic, which made the discovery look like bad news for anyone wearing the stuff. In 2010 French researchers reported the opposite possibility. At the low doses present in the makeup, lead salts touching skin push the body to produce more nitric oxide, a chemical that helps rouse the immune system against bacteria. Painted eyes may have been medicine as much as fashion.
An Egyptian papyrus tells a woman who suspects she is pregnant to urinate on a bag of barley and a bag of emmer wheat. If the grain grows, she is pregnant. In 1963 researchers actually ran the test. Urine from men and from women who were not pregnant kept the seeds from sprouting, while urine from pregnant women started them growing in about 70 percent of cases. The other half of the instruction, predicting the baby's sex, did not hold up.
Egyptian bread came with grit in it: wind-blown sand, and small stones that got in while the grain was ground. Eaten every day for a lifetime, that mixture worked like slow sandpaper. Studies of ancient Egyptian remains find heavy tooth wear the most common condition of all, and in the worst cases enamel and dentin wore through to the pulp, which died and turned into an infection at the root. Without antibiotics, such an infection could kill.
The Egyptian year was organized around the river. It ran in three seasons: Akhet, when the Nile flooded; Peret, the growing season; and Shemu, the harvest. Each season held four months, each month held three weeks, and each week ran ten days rather than seven. To follow the flood itself, Egyptians built nilometers and read the recorded heights the way later farmers read an almanac. One well-preserved example still stands on Elephantine Island at Aswan.
The stone had been built into the wall of a fort near Rashid in the Nile Delta, and it sat there unremarked until July 1799, when a French team rebuilding the fort noticed it. The officer in charge was Pierre-François Bouchard. Two decades of work followed. Thomas Young cracked the cartouche spelling Ptolemy, and Jean-François Champollion, aged thirty-one, put the whole system together and announced it in Paris in 1822.
Everyone knows the line. Lord Carnarvon asked whether Carter could see anything, and Carter answered, "Wonderful things." That wording comes from the account Carter published afterward. The notes he made at the time say something plainer: "Yes, it is wonderful." Somewhere between a candlelit hole in a blocked doorway and the printed page, the sentence acquired its polish. The tomb behind the door needed no help at all.
The curse of Tutankhamun has outlived everyone it was supposed to have killed. In 2002 the physician Mark Nelson published a study in the BMJ that followed 44 Westerners whom Howard Carter recorded as being in Egypt at the key dates, 25 of them exposed to the tomb. The exposed died at a mean age of 70, the unexposed at 75, and the gap was not statistically significant. His conclusion was that there is no evidence for a curse.
Royal tombs were being robbed, so the mummies were moved for safekeeping, again and again, until they ended up together in a shaft near Deir el-Bahari. As Ahmed Abd el-Rassul told it, he climbed down after a stray goat and found a corridor of dusty coffins. His family sold from the tomb quietly for years, until objects on the Luxor market gave them away. In 1881 Émile Brugsch cleared more than fifty mummies and nearly six thousand objects in two days and shipped them downriver.
The bust came out of the ground at Tell el-Amarna on December 6, 1912, in a workshop full of plaster study heads. An inscription at the site identified the sculptor as a man named Thutmose. Ludwig Borchardt was directing the excavation, though a colleague was supervising the trench that day while Borchardt received visiting Saxon nobility. The left eye has no inlay. Borchardt had the debris sifted at once, found nothing, and wrote in his 1923 publication that the inlay had never existed at all.
In 2013 a French team under Pierre Tallet found rolls of papyrus in caves at Wadi al-Jarf on the Red Sea coast, the oldest known papyri in the world. One set belonged to an official named Merer, who ran a crew of some 200 men. His entries are pure logistics: load limestone at the Tura quarries, move it to Giza, report to the noble Ankh-haf. He was writing while the Great Pyramid was still going up.
In 1954 a sealed pit alongside the Great Pyramid turned out to hold a dismantled ship: 1,224 pieces of cedar packed under a row of forty limestone blocks. Reassembled, the vessel runs about 140 feet and weighs 20 tons. What it was for is still argued: part of Khufu's fleet in life, or a boat built to carry him after death. In 2021 it crossed Giza on a transporter to a new museum.
Muons rain down from the upper atmosphere and pass through stone, but dense stone absorbs more of them than empty space does. Detectors placed inside the Great Pyramid picked up a thin gap in 2016, and by March 2023 the team had it measured: a corridor about nine meters long and two meters on a side, behind the north face. An endoscope went in and photographed a vaulted ceiling nobody had seen in 4,500 years.
9Egypt's foreign mail, written in someone else's script
On the tile: Amarna letters1887
In 1887 clay tablets began surfacing at Amarna, the city Akhenaten built and Egypt abandoned. They were not in hieroglyphs. They were in Babylonian cuneiform, the diplomatic language of the age, and 382 are known. They carry correspondence between the Egyptian court and the kings of Babylon, Assyria, Mitanni and Hatti, covering the reigns of Amenhotep III and his son. Much of it is negotiation over marriages, gifts and professions of friendship.