Good afternoon. Everybody, lift your writing hand, rotate it in the air, and shake it out. We're going to do a marathon session today.

The history of Egypt is the longest continuous history, as a unified state, of any country in the world. The Nile valley forms a natural geographic and economic unit, protected to the east and west by deserts, to the north by the sea and to the south by the Cataracts of the Nile. The need to have a single authority to manage the waters of the Nile led to the creation of the world's first state in Egypt in about 3000 BCE. Egypt's peculiar geography made it almost impossible to attack, which is why Pharaonic Egypt remained an independent and self-contained state until Persians finally managed to invade about 343 BC.

Believe it or not, the general area was once pasture land you could actually live on. Climate changes and overgrazing over a couple of thousand years actually created the Sahara desert about 4500 years ago. (Remember that the next time you're tempted to shrug off modern issues like Global Warming.) Everyone in the area ended up moving to the Nile, along whose banks was rich agricultural land, handily refertilized every year by the regular flooding of the river.

Ongoing excavation in Egypt continually reshapes scholars' views about the origins of Egyptian civilization. What that means is that scholars have so few pieces to put together, every time they dig up a new pot, they have to re-evaluate everything they've assumed so far. It's either incredibly exciting or incredibly frustrating, depending on your level of interest. But this is the current thinking. For more information on that, apply to Dr. Jackson over in archaeology.

The first king to unified the whole of the Nile Valley established a capital at Memphis. Traditionally, we know this guy as "Menes", although it's doubtful that was his actual name. At the same time we have the development of writing, large scale construction, and the first trade and travel outside the valley itself. We also have the first attempts at mummification, a continuing refinement of the way sun and sand will naturally dry out a body, and a skill that would be developed to a high art form before the Egyptians were done with it.

All we need to cover about the mummies is that the Egyptians were very big on preparing for the afterlife. They believed that, without at least minimal preparation, a person's ka, their "spirit" or "soul" would be left to roam the mortal world as a desperate, helpless ghost forever. When that's your motivation, you get serious about your preparations. In order to rest peacefully, your body needed to be preserved well enough that your ka could recognize it, return to it after you died, and you could move on to the happy afterlife. If you were rich, you packed up all your things for the trip, including little clay servant figures to attend to all your afterlife bathing and grape-peeling needs. [[pauses]] That's a joke. You're allowed to laugh in my class.

Thus, the vast majority of what we know about the ancient Egyptians comes from what they socked away in their tombs with them for the journey to the afterlife -- everything from simple combs and chairs to expensive perfumes and gold. This has given many people the impression that the Egyptians were obsessed with death. Not true. They were actually quite obsessed with life. It's only that scholars today are left studying only their afterlife preparations simply because nothing much survives in a desert unless you do stash it away very carefully.

During this time, the Pharonic Era, the pharaoh was regarded as not only the sole ruler and absolute authority in the land, but as a living god on earth. The people sincerely believed that their pharaoh could assure the annual flooding of the Nile for their crops, without which they would all starve. They also, like most every other ancient culture, perceived themselves as a specially selected people, "the only true human beings on earth" I believe it went. Everyone always thinks they're the very best thing to ever hit the planet; it's only very recently that people have even pretended to consider humans worldwide as being roughly the same. Many places still don't.

And we can't forget the pyramids. The pyramids were originally built as tombs for the pharaohs, however the Egyptians weren't dumb and soon realized that a big stone "gold and treasure buried here!" sign was not the way to achieve a restful afterlife. In fact, no pyramid has ever been discovered with anything in it but a massive stone outer coffin literally too big for the doorway. All of the finds come from smarter, later rulers who had themselves buried in secret, unmarked caves in the Valley of The Kings. This at least made the graverobbers work for a living.

The pyramids still indicate now, as they did then, a truly impressive display of power and control. Face it, anyone who could afford to have massive segments of the population building piles of rocks in the desert six months of every year for twenty or thirty years -- instead of harvesting crops or fighting battles -- was someone to be reckoned with. A good pyramid nicely displayed both your country's wealth and your control over your people.

You'll all be relieved to know I'm not going to give you lists of dynasties and pharaohs to memorize; those you can always look up any time in your local library if for some unknown reason you find yourself with a need to actually needed to know them. Pharaohs came and went, dynasties rose and fall, sometimes natural disaster struck, sometimes the country was just plagued by the stupidity of those in charge. The point being, despite that, Ancient Egyptian society endured, largely unchanged and amazingly stable, for a good three thousand years.

Crete

Little is known about the rise of ancient Cretan society, because very few written records remain. This contrasts with the superb palaces, houses, roads, paintings and sculptures that do remain. Cretan history is surrounded by legends (such as those of King Minos; Theseus and the Minotaur; and Daedalus and Icarus) that have been passed to us via Greek historian/poets (such as Homer).

Crete was occupied down to the 15th century BCE by people who did not speak Greek, whom we call the Minoans. Evidence of their written language (Linear A) survives, but has not been deciphered by anyone who wasn't there at the time. Tablets inscribed in Linear A have been found in numerous sites in Crete, and a few in the Aegean islands. The Minoans established themselves in many islands besides Crete: secure identifications of Minoan off-island sites include Kea, Kythera, Milos, Rhodes, and above all, Thera (Santorini), the site about which most is known.

Because of the lack of written records, our estimates of Minoan chronology are based on well-established Aegean and Ancient Near Eastern pottery styles. Luckily for us, The Minoans were great sailors and active traders with contemporary civilizations around the Aegean, including Egypt. For the earlier times, radiocarbon dating of organic remains and charcoal suggest that Crete was inhabited from the 7th millennium BCE onwards.

The palace-complex at Knossos remains the the most famous Minoan site, but other palace sites in Crete (such as Phaistos) also demonstrate magnificent stone-built, multi-story palaces with elaborate and effective drainage systems that would not be seen again in Europe until the end of the Middle Ages. (And trust me, you don't properly appreciate effective drainage until you've lived a few millenia without them.) The queen even had a bath and a flushing toilet that you would probably find quite usable today. We're talking a very high level of hydraulic engineering here.

There were no defensive walls to the complexes, indicating that they were either never attacked -- unlikely given the wealth of their culture -- or that they were defended by a skilled navy -- very likely, given their tendency towards extensive shipbuilding skills and long-distance sea-trade. By the 16th century BCE pottery and other remains on the Greek mainland show that the so-called Minoans had far-reaching contacts on the mainland, and significant damage caused by a major earthquake on Crete and Thera was swiftly repaired, indicating a thriving, stable culture.

But about 1500 BCE a massive volcanic explosion blew the island of Thera apart, sending tonnes of rock, dirt, and other debris into the local atmosphere and generating a tsunami in the enclosed Aegean that threw pumice up to 250 meters above sea level on the slopes of Anaphi, 27 km to the east. The Monoans' entire fleet was almost certainly destroyed -- and all of their trading and defensive capabilities with it. By 1450 BCE, all of the major Minoan palaces, save Knossos, had been destroyed by fire and Mycenaeans from the mainland of Greece took over Knossos.

Right. Now that you are all soporific from overdosing with words, I'm going to give you something to think about. For tomorrow's discussion session: reflect on the two cultures we I discussed here today. One of them was incredibly long-lived and yet fairly stagnant, and one of them was fairly short-lived and yet incredibly energetic and diverse. Does stagnation make for a more stable culture? Or what other factors, such as their geographic placement, for an obvious example, could have contributed to their differences?

Last week, I didn't make you do any homework. This week, homework will be assigned tomorrow after the discussion session. It will be based on readings.

[[OOC: Once again, mad props to aka_vala, who isn't even in this class and yet is prepping my lectures for me. Her notes: (cribbed and modified from here and here)]]

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