History of the Ancient Near East · Part 3 · The first cities and kingdoms · B1
Egypt of the Pyramids
Part 3 of History of the Ancient Near East: at the same time as the cities of Sumer, the land of the Nile became one kingdom under one king. Its rulers built the largest stone monuments the world had ever seen, and its scribes wrote some of the first great stories. Comparatives and superlatives (the tallest building in the world until…, twice as heavy as…) and measurements (it weighs…, it is … high), with Philo, Sophia, Marcos and Demetria.
Tonight, the country we live in, as it was two and a half thousand years before Alexander founded our city.
The pyramids! My uncle took me to see them. They are the biggest things I have ever seen.
Herodotus says a cruel king built the biggest one with a hundred thousand slaves.
Herodotus says many things. Tonight, we will ask the workers.
Around 3100 BCE, Upper Egypt in the south and Lower Egypt in the Delta were united under one king. Egypt was a long, narrow green country along the Nile, with desert on both sides, and every year the river flooded and left rich black soil. It was probably the largest kingdom in the world at the time, with between one and two million people.
Historians divide its long history into periods. In the Old Kingdom (about 2686–2181 BCE), the kings, called pharaohs much later, built the pyramids as their tombs. The Great Pyramid of King Khufu, built around 2560 BCE, was about 146 metres high, and it remained the tallest building in the world for almost four thousand years, until a cathedral in England was built taller in the 14th century CE.
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