Class history project, 2026

Ancient Egypt, from the Nile to the pyramids.

The pyramids at Giza against a pale desert sky at sunrise

3,000

years of pharaonic rule, from about 3100 BCE to 30 BCE.

Start with the timeline, then explore daily life, the pyramids and writing, and the sources behind every fact.

Explore the project

Three short guides, each with its own page and its own sources.

01 Timeline Ten key dates, from the first hieroglyphs to the arrival of Rome. 02 Daily life Food, homes, the farming year and the games people played. 03 Pyramids and writing How the great tombs were built and how hieroglyphs worked.

01 Timeline

About 3,000 years in ten dates.

Dates are approximate and follow the usual scholarly ranges. BCE means before the Common Era.

c. 3200
Writing appears

Early hieroglyphs appear on labels, pottery and tablets, used to record goods and names.
c. 3100
Two lands become one

Tradition credits King Narmer with uniting Upper and Lower Egypt and starting the first dynasty.
c. 2650
The first stone pyramid

King Djoser's Step Pyramid at Saqqara is built as a stack of stone steps, the first large stone monument of its kind.
c. 2560
The Great Pyramid

Khufu's pyramid at Giza is finished. For about 3,800 years it is the tallest human-made structure on Earth.
c. 2055
The Middle Kingdom

Mentuhotep II reunites Egypt after a period of division. Canals, literature and trade flourish.
c. 1550
The New Kingdom

Pharaohs expand Egypt into an empire reaching Nubia and Syria, and build temples at Karnak and Luxor.
c. 1332
Tutankhamun

A boy king who reigns for about ten years. His almost untouched tomb is found in 1922.
c. 1279
Ramesses II

He rules for about 66 years and builds more monuments than almost any other pharaoh, including Abu Simbel.
30 BCE
Rome takes Egypt

After Cleopatra VII dies, Egypt becomes a Roman province and the pharaonic age ends.
1822 CE
Hieroglyphs read again

Jean-Francois Champollion uses the Rosetta Stone to show how hieroglyphs work, after centuries of silence.

Three big periods

c. 2686 to 2181 BCE

Old Kingdom

The age of the great pyramids. Kings are seen as living gods who guarantee the Nile flood.

c. 2055 to 1650 BCE

Middle Kingdom

A calmer, reunited land. Writers produce famous stories and officials dig irrigation canals.

c. 1550 to 1070 BCE

New Kingdom

An empire with rich temples, tombs cut into the Valley of the Kings and wealth from trade and tribute.

02 Daily life

Life along the Nile.

Most Egyptians were farmers, living in villages of mud brick close to the river. Their days followed bread, work and the water.

Loaves of bread baking beside a clay oven

Food and drink

Bread and beer were the staples. Bakers baked loaves in clay moulds, and brewers mixed grain into a thick, nourishing drink.

Small houses of sun-dried mud brick in a village

Homes

Houses were built from sun-dried mud brick, with flat roofs for sleeping and storage. Workers' villages near the pyramids were laid out in neat rows.

Schooling

Most children learned a trade from their parents. Boys who trained as scribes copied texts and practised writing on pottery and limestone flakes.

A year in three seasons

Akhet

The flood season. The Nile rose and spread rich black silt over the fields, and farmers waited while the land was under water.

Peret

The growing season. Once the water drained, farmers ploughed and sowed emmer wheat, barley and flax in the damp soil.

Shemu

The harvest season. Grain was cut, threshed and stored in granaries, and officials counted it for taxes.

Clothes, games and play

Clothing: simple linen kilts and dresses, with wigs and eye paint for the wealthy.
Footwear: sandals woven from papyrus and palm leaves.
Senet: a board game played by adults and children, with pieces moved across thirty squares.
Toys: balls, clay animals and dolls with moving parts for young children.

03 Pyramids and writing

Stone tombs and signs.

The pyramids were royal tombs built with great organisation. The writing that recorded them grew into one of the longest-lived scripts in history.

Large limestone blocks stacked in a pyramid wall

Building the Great Pyramid

Crews cut limestone from nearby quarries and granite from Aswan, then moved the blocks on wooden sledges, wetting the sand in front to reduce friction.

2.3m

Estimated stone blocks in the Great Pyramid, most of them local limestone.

146 m

Its original height, about 481 feet. The tip has since been lost.

c. 20

Years of work, by the usual estimate, with a crew working in shifts through the year.

Writing in three forms

Hieroglyphs

Carved and painted signs for temples and tombs. They mix sound signs, word pictures and marks that show the meaning of a word.

Hieratic

A faster, cursive form of hieroglyphs written in ink on papyrus for letters, records and literature.

650 BCE

Demotic

A simplified script from about 650 BCE, used for business and everyday documents until the Roman period.

04 Photos and sources

Pictures and where the facts come from.

The Great Sphinx in the desert at Giza — Fig. 1The Great Sphinx at Giza, traditionally linked to King Khafre of the Old Kingdom.

Tall stone columns in a large temple hall — Fig. 2Columns at the Karnak temple complex, built and extended over more than a thousand years.

A traditional sailing boat on the river at sunset — Fig. 3Sailing boats on the Nile, the highway that carried people and goods for thousands of years.

Fig. 4Carved hieroglyphs on a temple wall, the signs used for religious and royal texts.

A gold funerary mask displayed in a museum case — Fig. 5A gold funerary mask in a museum case, similar to those placed with royal burials.

Sand dunes at the edge of farmland — Fig. 6Desert dunes at the edge of the Nile valley, where the green farmland stopped.

Sources

Check with your teacher which of these are required for the presentation.

01
Ian Shaw, ed. The Oxford History of Ancient Egypt. Oxford University Press, 2000.
02
Toby Wilkinson. The Rise and Fall of Ancient Egypt. Bloomsbury, 2010.
03
Barry J. Kemp. Ancient Egypt: Anatomy of a Civilization, 2nd edition. Routledge, 2006.
04
The British Museum. Collection record for the Rosetta Stone. britishmuseum.org
05
The Metropolitan Museum of Art. Egyptian Art collection and Timeline of Art History. metmuseum.org
06
Photographs. Placeholder images from Picsum Photos, picsum.photos, to be replaced with credited photos before presenting.