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  • - [Narrator] In this video, we are going to give ourselves

  • an overview of ancient Egypt,

  • which corresponds geographically pretty closely

  • to the modern day state of Egypt in northeast Africa.

  • Now the central feature in both ancient Egypt

  • and in modern Egypt is the Nile River

  • that you see in blue right over here.

  • And the Nile River is one of the great rivers of the world.

  • It rivals the Amazon River as the longest river

  • and it sources the tributaries of the Nile Rover

  • start even south of this picture

  • and the water flows northward

  • and eventually its delta reaches the Mediterranean Sea.

  • The delta, which is where a river opens into the sea,

  • is called a delta because, as you can see, these rivers,

  • you can even see it from

  • the satellite pictures right over here,

  • they start branching up a bunch

  • and you have this upside down triangular region,

  • which looks a little bit like

  • an upside down Greek letter delta,

  • so that's why river delta is called that.

  • And this one just happens to be upside down.

  • If it was flowing the other way,

  • it would be a right-side-up delta.

  • So the Nile River, it flows from, you could say,

  • eastern mid-Africa up into the Mediterranean Sea

  • and because it has this northward flow,

  • the southern parts of the river are upriver

  • and they are actually called the Upper Nile.

  • So, Upper.

  • The Upper Nile is actually south of the Lower Nile,

  • of the Lower Nile.

  • And once again, that's because the Upper Nile is up river,

  • it's also flowing from higher elevations

  • to lower elevations.

  • So as you go south, you get to higher and higher elevations.

  • Now, the reason why the river is so important,

  • we studied this multiple times,

  • rivers are a source of fresh water,

  • when they flood they make the surrounding soil fertile,

  • they're suitable for agriculture,

  • and the Nile Valley is one of the first places

  • that we see agriculture emerging

  • during the neolithic period.

  • In fact, human settlement we believe

  • was along this Nile River Valley

  • as far as 6,000 BCE or 8,000 years ago,

  • and it might have been there even further back in time.

  • And because you have that agriculture,

  • it allowed for higher population densities,

  • which allowed for more specialization of labor

  • and more complex societies.

  • It's not a coincidence that some of the first,

  • that one of the first great civilizations emerged here.

  • Now, the story of the Nile River, or of Egypt,

  • and actually they are tied very closely,

  • even though Egypt is considered a lot of this region,

  • most of the human population, this is true even today,

  • is right along the river, around that fertile soil,

  • where the agriculture actually occurs.

  • In fact, this was so important to the ancient Egyptians

  • that their whole calendar, their seasons,

  • were based on what the Nile River was doing.

  • They had a season called the inundation,

  • or the flooding of the river, which makes the soil fertile.

  • They had a season of growth,

  • which is now talking about the growth of the crops

  • and they had a season of harvest.

  • And so you had people in this valley for thousands of years,

  • but when we talk about ancient Egypt,

  • we formally talk about it as a civilization

  • around 3,100, 3,150 BCE.

  • And this is where we get to our timeline right over here.

  • So we're talking about right around there on our timeline

  • and the reason why this is considered

  • the beginning of the ancient Egyptian civilization

  • is this is when we believe

  • that upper and lower Egypt were first united

  • under the king and there's different names used,

  • Narmer sometimes or Menes.

  • I'm going to mispronounce things

  • every now and then and I'm probably doing it here as well.

  • And so he was the king that unified upper and lower Egypt

  • into an empire and the empire, as we will see,

  • which lasted thousands of years,

  • every one of these spaces is a hundred years.

  • We're gonna go over huge time span,

  • but the ancient Egyptian civilization is roughly divided

  • into three kingdoms.

  • You have the old kingdom, which went from about,

  • right from about the 27th century BCE

  • up to about the 17th century BCE.

  • You have the middle kingdom and you have the new kingdom.

  • And once again, this is spanning right over here

  • over a thousand years of history.

  • And in between those, you have these intermediate periods

  • where the kingdom or the empire

  • was a little bit more fragmented.

  • You have in some of these intermediate periods,

  • you have some foreign rule.

  • But just to get a sense of some of what happened

  • over this thousands of years,

  • and I'm kind of laughing in my head

  • because it's hard to cover over two, 3,000 years,

  • in the course of just a few minutes,

  • but this will give you a sense of what ancient Egyptian

  • civilization was all about.

  • Now the kings are referred to as pharaohs

  • but as we'll see that term pharaoh is not really used

  • until we get to the new kingdom.

  • But I will refer to the kings as pharaohs

  • throughout this video,

  • just to say, hey these are the Egyptian kings.

  • And the old kingdom is probably most known today

  • in our popular culture for what we most associate

  • with ancient Egypt and that is the pyramids.

  • And here, right over here are the pyramids,

  • there's the Great Pyramid of Giza,

  • which is near modern-day Cairo today.

  • This is the Sphinx and they were built in that old period

  • under the Pharaohs Sneferu and Khufu, right over here

  • in the 26th century BCE.

  • And we are still trying to get a better understanding

  • of how this was done.

  • We actually now don't believe

  • that it was done by slave labor,

  • but instead it was done during, you could say,

  • the off season by the peasants as a form of taxation.

  • Okay, you're done planting or harvesting your crops?

  • Well now that you have some time,

  • and this shows actually the importance of agriculture

  • for freeing people up, so to speak,

  • why don't you help the pharaohs built these massive tombs,

  • which I've seen various estimates

  • that it might have taken some place between

  • 10 and 100,000 people several decades to build each.

  • But these are even today,

  • these were built over 4,500 years ago,

  • are some of the most iconic symbols

  • that humanity has ever created.

  • And the reason why we know so much about ancient Egypt

  • is that we have been able to decipher their writing.

  • It's a symbolic, they have these pictographs,

  • these hieroglyphics, I'm sure you've heard

  • of the word before,

  • and for a while we had no idea what they said.

  • We would see these encryptions in these tombs

  • and we had a sense that, okay these tombs,

  • especially things like the pyramids

  • would be for these great kings,

  • we could tell that it was a stratified society,

  • that nobility had better tombs than others,

  • but we didn't really have a good sense of what was going on

  • until we discovered this, which is the Rosetta Stone,

  • which was discovered in 1799.

  • The reason why this is so valuable

  • is it has the same text

  • written in three different languages.

  • It has it written in the hieroglyphs

  • of the ancient Egyptians,

  • and it has it written in a later script used in Egypt,

  • called demotic Egyptian, and most importantly,

  • it has it also written in Greek.

  • And so historians were able to say,

  • okay, we can now start to decipher what these symbols mean

  • because we have a translation of them

  • and that's why it's one of the first civilizations

  • where we're able to put the picture together.

  • And hieroglyphics are one of the first forms of writing.

  • But let's now go on in our journey

  • through thousands of years of ancient Egyptian civilization.

  • Between the old kingdom and the middle kingdom,

  • you have the first intermediate period

  • and then you have the middle kingdom

  • and then you have the Hyksos,

  • which are Semitic people,

  • Semitic referring to their language

  • being of the same family as Semitic languages like Arabic,

  • or Hebrew, or Aramaic.

  • But then you have the new kingdom,

  • and the new kingdom is considered to be the peak

  • of ancient Egypt.

  • It's really the height of their technology,

  • it's the height of their military capability.

  • And there are several pharaohs that are worthy of note

  • in the new kingdom.

  • The first is, he was born Amenhotep

  • or he was originally known as Amenhotep the Fourth

  • and then he eventually names himself Akhenaton

  • and Akhenaton means effective for Aton,

  • Aton being a significant Egyptian god.

  • And the reason why he changed his name is he decides

  • that, okay we have, the Egyptians have this huge

  • pantheon of gods.

  • Here is just the some of them right over here,

  • this is the god Osiris, often associated with the afterlife

  • or transition, regeneration, resurrection.

  • You have the god Amun here and his first name Amenhotep,

  • it means Amun is satisfied.

  • What is considered kind of the equivalent of Zeus,

  • you have the god here Horus

  • ,

  • once again a very significant god

  • at different times in Egypt,

  • but what was interesting about Amenhotep the Fourth

  • or Akhenaton, whichever name you want to use,

  • is he decided, no, no, no, I don't like this pantheon,

  • this polytheistic religion that we have,

  • I wanna worship one god,

  • and the god that he decides to worship

  • is really the, you could consider it the sun god,

  • or the sun disc, and its representation looks

  • something like this and it was referred to as Aten

  • and so he changes his name to Akhenaton

  • and he actually starts to try to get rid of evidence

  • of these other gods or to make them a lot less important.

  • And so the reason why that's notable

  • is this is viewed as perhaps

  • one of the first attempts at monotheism,

  • at least within this ancient Egyptian civilization.

  • He's also noted for giving a lot of power to his wife,

  • to the queen, Nefertiti,

  • who some people say was second in command,

  • or even co-ruled alongside him.

  • Now he was also famous because after his death,

  • eventually, his son, King Tut, Tutankhamen, comes to power.

  • And the reason why King Tut, as he's often known,

  • although it's Tutankhamen, is known is because

  • we were able to find his tombs in relatively good order

  • and so he's become a popular part of the imagination.

  • And he's known as a child pharaoh.

  • He comes to power when he's very young,

  • he dies at 18 and so it's kind of an interesting story.

  • Now, most prominent amongst all of the pharaohs

  • across Egyptian history,

  • and this is also in the new kingdom,

  • comes a little bit after Tutankhamen,

  • is Ramses the Second.

  • And Ramses the Second, who emerges here in the 13th century,

  • and he rules for most of the 13th century BCE,

  • he represents really the peak of Egypt, ancient Egypt,

  • as a military power.

  • He's famous for the Battle at Kaddish,

  • which is the earliest battle where we actually know

  • what the tactics and the formations were

  • and it was with the also significant Hittite Empire

  • in 1274 BCE, this is an image drawn much, much later,

  • of the Battle of Kaddish.

  • The battle, we now believe,

  • might have been a bit of a stalemate,

  • Ramses the Second wasn't able to capture Kaddish,

  • but has told us a lot about military tactics

  • and strategy and formation of that time.

  • Historians today think it might have been the largest

  • chariot battle maybe ever.

  • So this was a significant thing that happened.

  • Now, eventually the new kingdom does collapse,

  • as we get to the end of the second millennium,

  • and then over the next several hundreds of years,

  • we're talking about a very long period of time,

  • it gets fragmented, you have several rulers,

  • you have the Kushites rule from the Upper Nile,

  • the Kushites were in this area right over here.

  • They rule for a brief period.

  • The Assyrians, that's a Mesopotamian civilization,

  • they rule for a small period of time,

  • and then eventually and we talk about this in some detail

  • in other videos, you have the Persians take over,

  • you have Cambyses, Cyrus the Great's son,

  • he's able to rule over, he's able to conquer Egypt

  • and Egypt becomes part of the Achaemenid Empire for a while

  • until the conquering of Alexander the Great.

  • And after Alexander the Great dies,

  • one of his generals and his dynasty takes over,

  • Ptolemaic Egypt and now it's being ruled by foreigners,

  • well it's been ruled by foreigners for a while now,

  • but now it's by the Greeks

  • and the famous Cleopatra,

  • who's considered a pharaoh of Egypt,

  • she's actually Greek by blood,

  • she's actually the one that seduced you could say

  • Julius Caesar and Marc Antony

  • and after Cleopatra's death, more and more,

  • actually eventually it becomes part of Rome.

  • So as you can see we covered this enormous large

  • time period in history,

  • one of the most significant civilizations in all of history,

  • one of the most famous poems about civilizations

  • and rulers, about Ramses the Second, the poem Ozymandias

  • was named after him.

  • You have some of the great cities of the ancient world,

  • Thebes, which was the capital

  • during parts of the new kingdom and the middle kingdom,

  • you have Memphis, which was one of the,

  • some people say founded by Menes

  • and the capital of the old kingdom.

  • These were all happening in ancient Egypt.

- [Narrator] In this video, we are going to give ourselves

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古代エジプト|初期文明 (Ancient Egypt | Early Civilizations | )

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    Amy.Lin に公開 2021 年 01 月 14 日
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