What historical fact blows your mind?

shutterstock

One thing that never ceases to blow my mind is how long Ancient Egypt actually existed in relation to the rest of the world.

Ancient Egyptian history took place over a LONG time. Scholars will debate on specifics but generally Ancient Egyptian society lasted from around 3,150 BC until at least 332 BC with the Macedonian invasion. That is almost 3,000 years of history for those of you doing the math.

The Egyptian pyramids, for example, were constructed over a period of almost 2,000 years. That means when the last major pyramid was being constructed, in the 7th century BCE, some of the oldest pyramids were already ancient, at over 2,000 years old.

2,000 years is a long time. It’s over 100 generations of ancestors, it’s the amount of time between the death of Julius Caesar and today. When ancient Egyptians living in the 7th century BCE went outside and looked upon the pyramids, it was akin to you or I going to Rome today and looking at the Coliseum. The Coliseum is ancient to us, and similarly the pyramids were ancient even to many ancient Egyptians.

By the time Alexander the Great conquered Egypt in 332 BC, the Egyptian civilization had already existed in much the same form for almost 3,000 years, the same amount of time that separates today from the very beginning of Ancient Greece.

So to think of it another way, all of the history of Ancient Greece, Ancient Rome, the Middle Ages, the Age of Exploration, and the Modern age, could fit in the same amount of time as Ancient Egyptian history.

What’s even crazier to think about, though, is how similar the Egyptian society was over such a huge time frame. In the beginning, the Egyptians were mostly farmers who tended crops along the banks of the Nile, wrote using hieroglyphs, and worshipped a complex group of gods. In the end the Egyptians were still mostly farmers, who could still write hieroglyphs and still worshipped their traditional Egyptian gods. Over nearly 3,000 years of history, the borders of Egypt didn’t change much (compared to, say, the Romans who conquered the whole Mediterranean), and their daily lives were much the same.

Of course things change over time, and the Egyptian language, gods, and farming techniques changed, but not as radically as you might expect given the amount of time involved here.

For comparison in the past 2,000 years we went from ancient Rome to the atomic bomb, Internet, and the airplane.