The Egypt Story ......... People's management !

The quest for the past is discovering how the people in ancient Egypt lived thousands of years ago. While people in the rest of the world were still living in caves and chasing animals, how did the Egyptians manage to build the civilization which is still fascinating us until this day? Most people now focus on the great stone work, especially when it comes to the building of the pyramids. How did they cut the stone? How did they move them? How did they put them all together in that perfect way, in a very advanced and complicated form? All very valid questions. 

Yet the most important question of all is, how did they manage the 100,000 builders and stone masons who were gathered there? As Herodotus mentioned (even if it was not 100% correct),people management was the secret of success in ancient Egypt! Over thousands of years, how did they manage to move, train, educate and control those thousands of people? Every one of them knew exactly what he was supposed to do, which might be different from what he did yesterday, or what he might do tomorrow. How can we imagine feeding that number of people? What sort of catering was used that long time ago? What was the health condition? The medical care? The death and accident rate? How did they manage all of that? 

A popular theory is that the ancient Egyptians used slaves to build those pyramids. This theory is so wrong if we just think of all the logistical issues. How can you control thousands of slaves in the open desert without the fear of every one of them rising up to fight for his freedom? The pyramids, as well as the rest of the Egyptian civilization, were built with love, not fear; with happiness, not slavery. It was an immensely great honor to be among the team selected to build the house of eternity for the god king. If we keeping trying to understand the ancient Egyptian civilization through our backgrounds of today, we are making a big mistake; we have to see life through their eyes.

Written by :

Hisham El Meniawy
Guest lecturer & Egyptologist
www.hegyptology.com

The Egypt Story....... (Life & Death )

The ancient Egyptians had a great respect for life and all different creatures. For hours and hours, day after day, they watched what happened around them in the natural world. They had everything; water, food, fertile land, animals, birds, the sun and lovely weather. They then faced the inevitable fact of this life, which is death; sooner or later they would die and their life would come to an end. They started to wonder what would happen to them after death!

From there they started to believe in a second life; life after death in the hereafter, which would be an eternal life and would last forever. They loved life and wanted to be immortal, so they kept their eyes on the second life even more than the first. In believing in life after death, they assumed they would take a journey from the first life to the second one in the underworld. That journey would be very dangerous and full of enemies and bad spirits, so they needed guidance and guardians, and their gods would fill that role. They also needed guide books to direct them and usher them into the underworld, so books like the Book of the Dead, the pyramid texts and coffin texts were there to help them and show them the way.

To come back in the afterlife, they needed their bodies well preserved, so they practiced mummification to keep the body in good form. They built the tombs, which were known as the houses of eternity, where they would live until they were called by the gods on the judgment day. On that day they would be judged by the god Osiris, and their heart would be weighed against the feather of justice. If the heart is heavy it means that person was evil and will be sent to hell, while if his heart is lighter than the feather, it means he was good and will go to heaven. Heaven or hell would be eternal, so we can understand how important the second life was. That is why when they built tombs or temples, they used stone, while building their houses and even their palaces, and they used mud brick and wood. In most of the cases, these houses couldn't survive to today.

We can never say that the ancient Egyptian art was boring or dull, because they always mention death and the afterlife. One could say it was very practical to dream of the eternal life in heaven, which was their main motive to build that great civilization.

written by :

Hisham El Meniawy
Guest lecturer & Egyptologist

www.hegyptology.com

The Egypt story....... (The quest)

The ancient Egyptian civilization has been always fascinating, and since the time of the early Greek travelers to Egypt, people have been wondering about the secret of the mystical civilization. People always wonder why and how the ancient Egyptians managed to build all those massive buildings, and why what is left is only what was built for the afterlife. It's very important to understand what the ancient Egyptians thought about life and death in order to be able to answer all the questions.

Egypt, which is located in the very northeast part of Africa, is considered part of the Sahara desert, and the Nile has been always the main source of water. It taught them how to form villages and towns, and how to learn to live together. The Nile was the first lesson of stability, teaching them agriculture; they needed to live by the river and use its water and silt to farm their land. It becomes very fertile because every year during the summer, the Nile rushes in a great inundation, covering the banks with lots of water for irrigation and it gives life to the soil and the people.

The symbol of life in ancient Egypt was the form of a key, called the "ankh", which is known as the key of life or the key of the Nile. We notice two things here; first that the river Nile and life have the same meanings, and second, it has the form of a key. The ancient Egyptians believed that the Nile god Hapi used that key to open the gates of the Nile in central Africa to let the Nile flood, creating life in its path.

By :

Hisham El Meniawy
Guest lecturer & Egyptologist
www.hegyptology.com