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Egypt was one of the first places where people began to write. The Egyptians did not write with letters like ours, but with signs that looked like little pictures—a lion, a spear, a bird, a whip. This picture-writing was called hieroglyphics—see if you can say hi-er-o-glyph-ics . Perhaps you have seen, in the puzzle sections of a newspaper, stories written in pictures for you to guess the meaning. Well, hieroglyphics were something like that.
Hatshepsut in
hieroglyphic writing
Here is the name of an Egyptian queen written in hieroglyphics. You would never guess her name from this funny writing. Her name was Hatshepsut. Can you say it? It’s not as hard as it looks at first. Hat SHEP sut . She was the first woman ruler known to history.
A king’s or queen’s name always had a line drawn around it, like the one you see around the name of Hatshepsut, in order to mark it more prominently and give it more importance. It was something like the frame that we put around a fine picture to make it look better where it hangs on the wall.
There was no paper in those days and so the Egyptians wrote on the stalks of a plant called papyrus that grew in the water. They pressed the thick stalks until they were thin and flat and looked like paper. It is from this name papyrus that we get the name paper . Can you see that paper and papyrus look and sound something alike? The Egyptians’ books were written by hand, of course, but they had no pencils nor pens nor ink with which to write. For a pen they used a reed, split at the end, and for ink a mixture of water and soot.
Their books were not made of separate pages like our books, but from long sheets of papyrus pasted together. This was rolled up to form what was called a scroll, something like a roll of wallpaper, and was read as it was unrolled.
Stories of their kings and battles and great events in their history they used to write on the walls of their buildings and monuments. This writing they carved into the stone, so that it would last much longer than that on the papyrus leaves.
All the old Egyptians, who wrote in hieroglyphics and knew how to read this writing, had died long since, and for a great many years no one knew what such writing meant. But a man found out by accident how to read and understand hieroglyphics once again. This is the way he happened to do so.
The Nile separates into different streams before it flows into the Mediterranean Sea. At the mouth of one of these streams is a port called Rosetta.
One day some soldiers were digging near Rosetta when they found a stone, something like a tombstone with three kinds of writing on it. The top writing was in pictures, which we now call hieroglyphics, and no one understood what it meant. Below this was written what was supposed to be the same story in the Greek language, and a great many people do understand Greek. All one had to do, therefore, to find out the meaning of the hieroglyphics, was to compare the two writings. It was like reading secret writing when we know what the letters stand for. You may have tried to solve a puzzle in the back of your magazine, and this was just such an interesting puzzle, only there was no one to tell the answers.
The puzzle was not as easy as it sounds, however, for it took a clever man almost twenty years to solve it. That is a long time for anyone to spend in trying to solve a puzzle, isn’t it? But after this key to the puzzle was found, men were able to read all of the hieroglyphics in Egypt and so to find out what happened in that country long ago.
This stone is called the Rosetta Stone. It is now in the great British Museum in London and is very famous, because from it we were able to learn so much history that we otherwise would not have known.
We know that Egypt was a fine place to live. It was chiefly on account of a habit of the river Nile—a bad habit you might at first think it—a habit of flooding the country once a year.
Menes, 3100 B.C.
It rained so hard that the water filled up the river Nile, overflowed its banks, and spread water and mud far out over the land, but not very deep.
The people knew when the overflow was coming. They invented a calendar to keep track of it. After most of the water dried up, it left a layer of rich, dark, moist earth over the whole valley. This was a natural fertilizer, like compost that some of your families may use in your own gardens. This fertile soil made it easy to grow dates, wheat, and other good things to eat.
We know also that Egypt was ruled by a king who was called a pharaoh. The first Egyptian king whose name we know was Menes. He came from southern Egypt and conquered the north. He united the country under his rule. He also declared that he was a god. So Egyptians believed that they should obey him both because he was king and because he was a god. Menes lived around 3100 B.C.
People in Egypt were divided into classes. Children in each class usually became what their parents had been. Only a very few ever got to move up.
The highest class of people were called priests. They were not like priests or ministers of a church nowadays, however, for there was no church at that time. The priests made the religion and rules, which everyone had to obey as everybody does the laws of our land.
The priests were not only priests; they were doctors and lawyers and engineers, as well. They were the best-educated class, and they were the only people who knew how to read and write, for it was very difficult, as you might suppose, to learn how to read and write hieroglyphics.
The next highest class to the priests were the soldiers, and below these were the lower classes—farmers, shepherds, shopkeepers, merchants, mechanics, and last of all the swineherds.
The Egyptians did not worship one God as we do. They believed in hundreds of gods and goddesses, and they had a special god for every sort of thing, who ruled over and had charge of that thing—a god of the farms, a god of the home, and so on. Some of their gods were good and some were bad, but the Egyptians prayed to them all.
Osiris was the chief god, and Isis was his wife. Osiris was the god of farming and judge of the dead. Their son, Horus, had the head of a falcon.
Many of their gods had bodies of men with heads of animals, animals they thought sacred. The dog and the cat were sacred animals. The ibis, which is a bird like a stork, was another. Then there was the beetle, which was called a scarab. If anyone killed a sacred animal he was put to death, for the Egyptians thought it much worse to kill a sacred and holy creature than to kill even a human being.