...HEREINISTHECURSEOFOSIRISTHEGOD........Perhaps you've come to the wrong term: you want
...HEREINISTHECURSEOFOSIRISTHEGOD.....,,,,,,...Term I an introduction to the Middle Ages
...HEREINISTHECURSEOFOSIRISTHEGOD......,,,,,,..or Term II mediaeval monarchs;
...HEREINISTHECURSEOFOSIRISTHEGOD........or you may have come to the wrong course altogether;
...HEREINISTHECURSEOFOSIRISTHEGOD.....,,,,,,...or even the wrong school.
...HEREINISTHECURSEOFOSIRISTHEGOD........Maybe you're an interloper, looking for nothing in particular, in which case
...HEREINISTHECURSEOFOSIRISTHEGOD......,,,,,,..may the Curse of Osiris rest on you
...HEREINISTHECURSEOFOSIRISTHEGOD......,,,,,,..and on the seed of your loins to the fifth generation.
............................................UNIT III
................,,,,,n.m.......ANCIENT EGYPT
..................17 April
Key concepts
1. Africa2. The Nile (and the desert)
3. cataracts
4. Upper Ægypt, Lower Ægypt, the Delta
5. Pharoah
6. dynasties
7. hieroglyphics
8. age
Basic dates, to be memorised
3050 B.C. Egypt becomes a dynastic state (what is a dynasty?).......Dynasties I to XXVIII
525 B.C. Egypt conquered by Persians (Dynasties XXIX and XXI)
332 B.C. Egypt conquered by Alexander the Great:
.......but soon independent again under the Greek Ptolemaic Dynasty (XXXII)
30 B.C. Egypt annexed by Rome
.......but maintains its culture and language
A.D. 640 Egypt overrun by the Arabs
.......who still occupy it
..................24 April
1. Anton Gill’s grand Channel 4 documentary, Ancient Egyptians (2003), parts I, II, and III.
2. A class test on Gill, and on dates and key concepts from last week.
..................27 April: a public holiday, ‘Resistance Day’,
commemorating the establishment on 26th April 1941 of the so-called Liberation Front of the Slovenian People. Since we are historians, we do not have to believe tosh. The Front was simply a Communist organisation, obedient to Stalin, who was Hitler's ally; it therefore did not resist Italian and German occupation until Hitler attacked Russia in June. After that it settled down to the serious business of creating a Communist society through genocide, killing in cold blood some half a million people, essentially for being anti-communist. When the war ended the Front renamed itself renamed Socialist Alliance of the Working People of Slovenia and seized power; the Tito dictatorship “probably killed even more people, now also including the rich, landlords, bourgeoisie, clerics, and in the later 1940s, even pro-Soviet communists.” A holiday's a holiday, so we can't complain, but the idea of ‘Resistance Day’ itself calls out for resistance. Down with all tyranny, fascist or communist.
..................8 May
1. Anton Gill, parts III and and IV.
2. Some animated maps covering the history of Egypt: 1, 2 (Zionist), 3. This one isn’t quite accurate, but it’s delightfully energetic
3. Test on Gill, parts III and IV, and dates.
Getting through the vulgarity
4. Because Ægypt ‘failed’, and we inherit our cultural traditions from Greece and Rome instead, there seems to us to be something creepy about the Black Land of Kut (as they called it)........It lends itself to kitsch or sensationalism: as in
(a) these schemes of interior decoration: 1, 2, 3),
(b) Lord Lloyd Webber’s Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, 1 and 2. (There’s a calmer presentation of the biblical novel about Egypt in the film Joseph (1999); begin at 1.54.00.
(c) Steve Martin;
(d) The Mummy (1999).
.......All of which is fun. But we have to get over it before we study ancient Egypt.
..................15 May: midterm break,
a thoroughly legitimate holiday, with no fraud to it.
..................22 May
Getting past the mere spectacle
Ægyptian civilisation had a continuous history in the same place for 36 centuries. It built amazing things, and is still visually dazzling.1. .......A good approach to the mere spectacle of Ægypt is Cleopatra (Joseph L. Mankiewicz, 1963), the most expensive film ever made. They spent $340 million on it, adjusted for inflation - more than the present Gross Domestic Product of Micronesia, Kiribati, Sao Tome and Principe, the Cook Islands, Anguilla, Palau, the Marshall Islands, Tuvalu and Niue (CIA Handbook). Even Titanic cost only $290m - a mere home movie by comparison. Cleopatra came in at 2200% over budget, almost bankrupted 20th Century Fox, and introduced Richard Burton to Elizabeth Taylor, leading to the most endless and inconclusive love affair of the twentieth century. Among other foolishness, they used to visit this part of the world to fawn on the monster Tito. Burton had crypto-Communist views. Taylor wasn’t into thought.
.......Afterward the studio transformed the sets of Cleopatra into a whole suburb, which you can still walk around if you ever visit Los Angeles. (Don’t.)
.......The film’s a silly mess, but that doesn’t matter. Just think of the pyramid of dosh they burned to make it. So turn off your critical intellect. Click this button, and watch it (for free) on your knees.
2. By way of relief from all this balderdash, we study Anton Gill, parts V and VI.
..................29 May
Class examination
on the year’s work...................5 June: school street party
for the birthday in this Diamond Jubilee year of Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God Queen of this Realm and of Her other Realms and Territories, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.
.......
.......It’s worth noting that Her Majesty is
almost certainly sprung from Egyptian monarchy: her descent can
be traced back to Amenemhat I, first pharoah of the XIIth Dynasty, who died
in 1962 B.C. (details here).
..................12 June
First, we study Anton Gill, parts VII, VIII and IX.
Then
Cleopatra
Cleopatra VII Philopator was the last independent Pharoah. She was the culmination of her dynasty, number XXXII, the Ptolemies, Greek in origin and culture. She nearly saved Ægypt by subduing Rome, all through her charm. (The painting, by Alma Tadema, shows Antony meeting her. He's impressed.).......She remains one of the most astonishing figures in history.
1. Here's a half-decent documentary about Cleoptra called Secrets of Egypt.
2. The wonderful play by Shakespeare she inspired, Antony and Cleoptra (begin at 54’’).
3. And this. Out in Hawai’i there’s a gang of history teachers who make unforgettable pastiche videos – History for Music Lovers, they call it. Here is their account of Cleopatra.
..................19 June
Akhenaten
Ægyptian civilisation lasted a long, long, long time, and was amazingly stable and
changeless. But it had one great convulsion: the religious revolution of
the rebel pharoah, Amenhotep IV, of the XVIIIth Dynasty.
On the thirteenth day of the eighth month, in the fifth year of his reign – 8th September 1348 B.C. –
he swept away the gods of Egypt and proclaimed the one God, whom he called Aten.
The pharoah was henceforth Akhenaten, Living Spirit of Aten.
.......Akhenaten has been “the first individual in history”, the first monotheist, first scientist, and first romantic.
.......We study Akhenaten and his revolution in The Greatest Pharaohs (1997), written by Scott Paddor and Wayne Grajeda: I, II, III.
.......He continues to fascinate more than any other character in Egyptian history. Here is another documentary (I, II); a 1954 movie; a wordless drama (I, II); a French cartoon; and a Philip Glass opera.
.......His revolution failed: his famous queen, Nefertiti, died; after his own death, the priests seized control of his son and heir, Tutankhamun (‘King Tut’), whose tomb happens to be the best preserved and most well-known of all ancient Egyptian tombs. The dynasty fell, and Akhenaten was denounced as the great enemy of Ægypt by the new dynasty.
.......Nevetheless, he may be the source of all the world’s great religions. Egypt may have produced the first regime to confess the One God.
Resources for ancient Egypt
The kidipediaLots of articles.
The Egyptian calendar
This programme converts dates.
Anton Gill, Ancient Egyptians (2003)
I, II, III, IV, V, VI, VII, VIII, IX, X, XI, XII, XIII,
XIV, XV, XVI, XVII, XVIII, XIX, XX, XXI, XXII, XXIII, XXIV and XXV.
George Bernard Shaw, Caesar and Cleopatra (1898)
This is the 1976 NBC production, with Sir Alec Guinness and Geneviève Bujold:
I, II, III, IV, V, VI and VII.
Scott Paddor and Wayne Grajeda, The Greatest Pharaohs (1997),
distributed by A&E, narrated by Frank Langella. Each part examines the lives of four Egyptian rulers:
I (Narmer, Hor-Aha, Sneferu, and Khafra),
II (Menkaura, Pepi II, Mentuhotep I, and Ahmose I),
III (Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, Ay, and Seti I),
IV (Ramses II, Ramses III, and Cleopatra VII).
If you want to study pyramids
How were they made? When? Why?
.......Begin with Anton Gill (VII, VIII). Perhaps a 100,000 workers were needed to make one. The great pyramids at Giza, remain among the largest structures ever built.
.......The Muslims tried to destroy them: they proved too massive and strong. still stupefy us.
If you want to study hieroglyup Our civilisation uses a phonetic alphabet: words are formed by letters which each make a sound (more or less).
.......The Ægyptians had an entirely different system: hieroglyphics (which means priestly carving). We'll study how to read them.
.......You can see some genuine hieroglyphics in the margins of this page. The table on the left turns them into an alphabet. This not how they really worked. But you may be amused to write your name in hieroglyphics.
.......How they really work is more like this or even this.
.......But how did we discover the secret of hieroglyphs? It all comes down to the Rosetta Stone .....
Next year
We follow the British national curriculum, for History at Key Stage 3 (Year 9).After the summer we’ll be tackling these units:
Term I: Unit 18: Hot war, cold war
Why did the major twentieth-century conflicts affect so many people?
Term II: Unit 14: The British Empire
How was it that, by 1900, Britain controlled nearly a quarter of the world?
Term III: Unit 21: From Aristotle to the atom
Scientific discoveries that changed the world.
.....
To email me
(ideally using the Latin alphabet,and not Egyptian hieroglyphs)
click on the Boat of Ra.