The Egyptian Empire one of the most powerful in history? It lasted for over 3,000 years, from its unification around 3100 BCE to its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 BCE. While it may not have been as advanced as sometimes portrayed in documentaries with unverified or unreliable sources, it is believed to have been the origin of many technologies and inventions.
However, it is important to note that tracing the true origins of these developments is often complex. For example, where exactly were mathematics first developed—Egypt, Greece, China, or India? While Egypt’s influence on the Mediterranean through trade—and vice versa—can be proven, it is difficult to definitively distinguish between independent development and external influence.
Regardless, modern Egyptology continues to unveil the vast knowledge of the ancient Egyptians through texts, architecture, artifacts, and archaeological discoveries.
The Splendors of Egyptian Architecture
The remains of monumental architectural achievements (temples, pyramids), still standing after millennia, bear witness to advanced skills in architecture and engineering. Geometry, in particular, appears to have been employed, primarily for areas and cylinders — this is what Egyptologists have observed in the Rhind Mathematical Papyrus and the Moscow Papyrus, which are key sources for our current understanding of ancient Egyptian mathematics.
While traditional houses were made using mud bricks and wood (a rare commodity, so it was imported for furniture), the most significant constructions (royal palaces, fortified buildings, etc.) were first built using sun-dried mud bricks, until the rise of stone construction during the 2nd and 3rd Dynasties. Around 2630 BCE, King Djoser, founder of the Old Kingdom, commissioned the architect Imhotep to build a tomb: he constructed the Step Pyramid at Saqqara, the first large stone structure known to date.
A century later, the Great Pyramid of Giza was constructed for King Khufu (also known as Cheops), located on the outskirts of Cairo. Classical historians have called it one of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. In his The Histories (Book II), the Greek historian Herodotus (~480-425 BCE) estimated that the pyramid was built in 20 years and required 100,000 men — a number that is widely considered to be an overestimate, given that the population of Egypt at that time likely did not exceed a million people. Later, two more pyramids were built on the plateau, for Pharaohs Khafre (also known as Chephren) and Menkaure. These structures are so impressive that even today, experts cannot definitively explain how they were built: What lifting systems were used to move the massive stone blocks? What methods, aside from human labor, were employed? Numerous scientific studies, however, propose several hypotheses.
The constructions, for instance, were likely placed near the Nile, as materials (such as limestone, granite, sandstone, etc.) were transported by river. As for the workforce, which experts know more about, it consisted of highly skilled artisans and workers, requisitioned by the pharaonic administration. They lived not far from the construction sites, as evidenced by discoveries made at the Deir el-Medina camp (also known as Set Maât her imenty Ouaset, its ancient name), located a 40-minute walk from the Valley of the Kings. These findings allowed archaeologists to provide a glimpse of a highly organized community, managed by a strong central authority.
“The only labor force in Ancient Egypt was human labor,” summarizes Egyptologist Guillemette Andreu-Lanoë in an interview with HuffPost, adding that Egyptians would have started using horses around 1500 BCE. And for lighting both inside and outside the pyramids, there were no light bulbs… but rather twisted wicks, dipped in oil!
Soldiers, think that from the top of these pyramids, forty centuries look down upon you.” — A phrase attributed to Napoleon Bonaparte (1769-1821) in Une histoire de Bonaparte (anonymous, published in 1803), supposedly uttered before the Battle of the Pyramids on July 21, 1798. A “fake,” one that the man who would later become emperor appreciated and ultimately adopted as his own.
New Mediums for Complex Writing
Although the invention of writing predates the Egyptians, they, along with the Mesopotamians, were among the first to develop their language into a complex, codified form. They managed to do so while retaining imagery through hieroglyphs—though the hieratic script, used by scribes, simplified these. The oldest known hieroglyphic writing dates back to the Thinite period (or Archaic period, around 3150-2700 BCE).
At the same time, they developed a medium for their writing: papyrus leaves, the first materials resembling paper, long before the development of paper by the Chinese in the 3rd century BCE. Before this, other civilizations used materials like stone, clay tablets, wood, or wax as writing surfaces. Papyrus became one of the most important—if not the most important—writing materials of the ancient world, extensively used in the Roman and Byzantine empires, with its use in Europe continuing until the 12th century CE.
Papyrus was made from the stem of a reed, Cyperus papyrus L. Although now very rare in the wild, it was once abundant along the banks of the Nile during ancient Egypt. Historians are still trying to determine the exact methods used to transform this plant into a writing surface. However, written descriptions seem to be lacking in the texts that have been found—and the few that have been identified do not provide further clarity for experts.
The manufacture of their black ink, made by grinding and mixing vegetable gum, soot, beeswax, and water, is better known. To produce different colors, they simply replaced the soot with different combinations of natural substances like leather, iron, quartz, ochre, malachite, and other fragments. A thick liquid was applied to the papyrus (a secret process), using a calamus (a dried reed sharpened at the tip), a brush, or a stylus—tools that were widely used for centuries by ancient Greece and Rome.
Irrigation: The Foundation of a Prosperous Agriculture
The Egyptians were able to build an empire and civilization on the foundation of great agricultural wealth. The annual flooding of the Nile, which provided irrigation and fertilization (silt) to the floodplain, was the most important aspect of their agriculture.
Landwork was equally essential, pushing farmers to develop sophisticated irrigation techniques, such as basins, canals, and ditches, to harness the floodwaters and bring water to more distant fields. This also led to the development of horticulture. Artificial irrigation was further enabled by the shaduf (or chadouf), a primitive balancing device used to lift water.
The saying “put the oxen before the plow” refers to the plow, a primitive tool with a wooden share used to till the soil, drawn by an animal, complementing manual labor with wooden tools. This was a true revolution in agriculture, although the technique may have originated earlier in Mesopotamia.
The first farmers dug trenches from the Nile bank to the fields, using wells, then the Shaduf, a primitive machine that allowed them to raise the Nile’s water levels into the canals… The irrigated fields produced abundant annual harvests. By the predynastic period, agriculture was the backbone of the Egyptian economy. Most Egyptians worked in agriculture, either on their own land or on the estates of temples or nobles.
— Margaret Bunson, Encyclopedia of Ancient Egypt (Gramercy Books, 1991).
Medicine: From Surgery to Mummification
While agriculture was essential for food production, it also enabled the acquisition of plants used in cosmetics or medicine, such as those involved in the embalming process. “More than 2,000 different species of flowering or aromatic plants have been found in tombs,” according to the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations.
There is ample evidence of the Egyptians’ expertise in preserving bodies. After thousands of years, specialists are even able to identify the diseases the mummified individuals suffered from. However, they were not only experts in death; the Edwin Smith Papyrus, written (or more likely copied) around 1500 BCE, is the oldest known document dealing with surgery. It describes forty-eight surgical cases, the procedures to follow, and the instruments they used. The Cairo Museum houses a collection of these instruments, including scalpels, forceps, probes, and pincers.
Determining Time and Years
While the Sumerian cities seem to have been the first to conceive a calendar based on the movements of the Moon, the ancient Egyptians developed a highly precise solar calendar, relying on the seasonal reappearance of the star Sirius (the brightest in the sky after the Sun) in the eastern sky. The Egyptian civil calendar was thus organized into three seasons tied to the fluctuations of the Nile — Akhet (“flood”), Peret (“emergence”), and Chémou (“heat”) — each consisting of four months of 30 days. However, to ensure that this calendar (365 days), which was used for governmental and administrative tasks, aligned perfectly with the slightly longer solar year (364 ¼ days), five additional days, known as epagomenal days, were added at the end of the year, regarded as the birth dates of the great gods.
It was ultimately Julius Caesar, around 46 BCE, who, adopting the Egyptian calendar, added a leap day every four years (leap year), thus forming the Western calendar we use today.
To measure time, the ingenious Egyptians are believed to have been the originators of two types of clocks. The first example of a sundial was erected in Egypt around 1500 BCE: an obelisk, identical to the one in Place de la Concorde in Paris. A semicircle was divided into twelve parts at its base, and the shadow of the monument indicated the time. The gnomon later allowed for equal hours, regardless of the season.
They also created a water clock, the clepsydra: stone containers were filled with water, and a hole at the bottom allowed the flow to pour out at a constant rate. Pre-carved notches inside marked the time. One of these instruments, dating from the reign of Amenhotep III (around 1530 BCE), was discovered in the Karnak Temple, presumably used by his priest to determine the time during religious rites at night, when the obelisk could not be used.