Ancient Egypt, a timeline
Three thousand years of pharaohs in twelve dated moments — from the first farmers on the Nile mud to the pyramids, Hatshepsut, Tutankhamun and the day Rome took over.
Farmers settle the Nile
Egypt is a gift of its river. Every summer the Nile flooded and left a strip of black silt across the desert, and farming villages grew along it. The Egyptians named their whole country the black land after that mud.
Egypt is united
Around three thousand one hundred BC a king from the south conquered the delta and wore both crowns at once. That union created what may be the world's first true nation state, and it lasted, on and off, for three thousand years.
The first pyramid
Then a man called Imhotep did something nobody had ever done. He stacked six stone platforms into a step pyramid sixty metres high, the oldest large stone building on Earth, and centuries later he was worshipped as a god.
The Great Pyramid of Giza
Barely a century later they got it right. The Great Pyramid used more than two million blocks, rose one hundred and forty six metres, and remained the tallest structure anywhere in the world for roughly three thousand eight hundred years.
The Old Kingdom collapses
Then the machine broke. The floods failed for decades, harvests collapsed and the central government fell apart. Inscriptions from those years describe a famine so complete that people stopped believing any king could command the river.
The Middle Kingdom golden age
A southern family reunited the country and the Middle Kingdom became Egypt's classical age. Its poems and adventure stories were still being copied out by schoolboys a thousand years later, rather as we still read Shakespeare in school today.
Hatshepsut takes the throne
Then a woman took the throne and kept it for twenty two years. Hatshepsut sent a trading fleet to the distant land of Punt and built a terraced temple that still looks modern. Later kings tried to chisel her name off every wall.
Akhenaten bans the gods
About a century after her, Akhenaten did the strangest thing in Egyptian history. He abolished the old gods, made everyone worship the sun disc alone, and built a brand new capital in empty desert that was abandoned within twenty years of his death.
Tutankhamun restores the old order
His young son inherited the mess and quietly switched everything back. Tutankhamun ruled about nine years and died at around eighteen, a very minor king, famous today only because his small tomb was the one the robbers missed.
The Battle of Kadesh
Ramesses the Second fought the Hittites at Kadesh with perhaps five thousand chariots, the largest chariot battle ever fought. Both sides claimed victory, and fifteen years later they signed a peace treaty whose text still hangs at the United Nations.
Alexander the Great arrives
By the time Alexander the Great walked in, the Great Pyramid was already more than two thousand two hundred years old, meaning it was roughly as ancient to him as he now is to us. He founded Alexandria on the coast, and his general Ptolemy began a Greek dynasty that ruled for three centuries.
Cleopatra dies and Rome takes over
The last of that line was Cleopatra. When she died and Rome took over, Egypt had been a kingdom for three millennia. Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
Watch it explain itself
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