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Doorjamb Block of Ramesses II
This limestone doorjamb block bears the name of the Egyptian pharaoh Ramesses II. The name of the pharaoh is written inside cartouche, the royal name-ring, with the sun-disc above, and the hieroglyph for "gold," the symbol of eternity, below...
Definition
Script
Script is the written expression of a language. Cuneiform, the first script, was invented in Sumer, Mesopotamia c. 3500 BCE, hieroglyphics sometime prior to the Early Dynastic Period in Egypt (c. 3150-2613 BCE), and Sanskrit in India during...
Definition
Ancient Egyptian Religion
Egyptian religion was a combination of beliefs and practices which, in the modern day, would include Egyptian mythology, science, medicine, psychiatry, magic, spiritualism, herbology, as well as the modern understanding of 'religion' as belief...
Article
The Pyramid Texts: Guide to the Afterlife
The Pyramid Texts are the oldest religious writings in the world and make up the principal funerary literature of ancient Egypt. They comprise the texts which were inscribed on the sarcophogi and walls of the pyramids at Saqqara in the 5th...
Article
Daily Life in Ancient Egypt
The popular view of life in ancient Egypt is often that it was a death-obsessed culture in which powerful pharaohs forced the people to labor at constructing pyramids and temples and, at an unspecified time, enslaved the Hebrews for this...
Definition
The Negative Confession
The Negative Confession (also known as The Declaration of Innocence) is a list of 42 sins which the soul of the deceased can honestly say it has never committed when it stands in judgment in the afterlife. The soul would recite these in the...
Definition
Hathor
Hathor is an ancient Egyptian goddess associated, later, with Isis and, earlier, with Sekhmet but eventually was considered the primeval goddess from whom all others were derived. She is usually depicted as a woman with the head of a cow...
Article
Shabti Dolls: The Workforce in the Afterlife
The Egyptians believed the afterlife was a mirror-image of life on earth. When a person died their individual journey did not end but was merely translated from the earthly plane to the eternal. The soul stood in judgement in the Hall of...
Article
Ten Ancient Egypt Facts You Need to Know
Ancient Egypt is defined as the civilization which flourished in North Africa between c. 6000-30 BCE – from the Predynastic Period in Egypt (c. 6000 - c. 3150 BCE) through the Ptolemaic Dynasty (323-30 BCE) before Egypt became a province...
Video
How Egypt invented the alphabet - History of Writing Systems #7 (Abjad)
From Egyptian hieroglyphs to your alphabet, watch these miners turn fancy symbols into simple scratches that were all about the sounds. First marvel at hieroglyphic inscriptions in the shadow of the great pyramids. Once you grasp how those...