Old Kingdom Egypt

EGYPTIAN HISTORY
STONE AGE
OLD KINGDOM
FIRST INTERMEDIATE PERIOD
MIDDLE KINGDOM
SECOND INTERMEDIATE PERIOD
NEW KINGDOM
THIRD INTERMEDIATE PERIOD
PERSIAN EGYPT
HELLENISTIC EGYPT
ROMAN EGYPT
ISLAMIC EGYPT

The pyramids at Giza

When Egypt was first unified around 3000 BC under a Pharaoh from Upper Egypt (the south), the Pharaohs quickly came to have a great deal of power over their subjects. The Pharaohs' capital was at Memphis. This slate palette - the Narmer Palette - has a hole in the middle for mixing eye shadow. But the carvings seem to show the Pharaoh of Upper Egypt standing up and beating the Pharaoh of Lower Egypt.

Narmer Palette showing the unification of Egypt

Because the Old Kingdom was so long ago, we don't have a lot of information about this time. It seems that the Pharaohs organized the first systematic irrigation from the Nile river, which allowed still more people to live in Egypt without starving. The Pyramids were built in this period as great tombs for the Pharaohs. Probably they were built by people who were usually farmers, like most people at that time. They may have been built a little at a time each year, during the Nile floods when people couldn't do farm work anyway. Recent archaeology suggests that the earliest Pharaohs also engaged in human sacrifice. About the same time, another great civilization was arising in Sumer.

To find out more about Old Kingdom Egypt, check out these books from Amazon.com or from your library:

Eyewitness: Ancient Egypt, by George Hart. For kids.

The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt, by Ian Shaw (2002).

History of Ancient Egypt: An Introduction, by Erik Hornung (1999). A college textbook. On the conservative side - not much on new developments.

Ancient Near Eastern History and Culture, by William H. Stiebing (2002). Expensive for a paperback, but brief and very up to date. And yes, it includes Egypt in the Near East.