ANCIENT EGYPT | They did WHAT to make a mummy?!

Ancient Egypt was an amazing place. Pyramids, mummies, hieroglyphics, it's epic. And that's all part of the story for sure, but there's a lot more to Ancient Egypt than just the stuff we see in the movies. In this video, we're going to go deeper and learn even more about the mysterious land of the pharaohs. And of course, we'll talk about the mummies and pyramids too. The story of Ancient Egypt spans thousands of years and many different dynasties. Historians break up the history of Ancient Egypt into four basic parts. The pre-dynastic period, the Old Kingdom, the Middle Kingdom, and you guessed it, the New Kingdom. Egypt is considered one of the cradles of civilization. It is the birthplace of one of the oldest and longest lasting civilizations in Earth's history. Starting way back more than 5,000 years ago, Egypt was divided into two kingdoms, the Upper Kingdom and the Lower Kingdom. You might be asking, why is the Upper Kingdom on the bottom and the Lower Kingdom is on the top? It all has to do with the Nile River. The Nile is the longest river in the entire world and it flows from the mountains in the south to the river delta next to the Mediterranean Sea in the north. That is a distance of 4,000 miles. That's like a river flowing from New York City to Alaska. That is redonkulous. The Nile floods every year at the same time during the rainy season. The rains in the mountains to the south make the river swell over its normal river banks in the north and out onto the farmland, especially in the river delta. When it floods, it brings soil from the bottom of the river out onto the flooded land. This special soil is called silt and it's full of vitamins and minerals that help plants grow very well. This was the secret sauce for great farming in Egypt. Most years, Egyptians grew enough food to feed everyone and store some for later. They grew wheat, beans, lettuce, onions, and other vegetables for food, emmer for drinks, and papyrus for rope, sandals, and paper. Most common people ate plant-based foods and fish. At the end of the rainy season, when the water level drops, the silt settles onto the farmland. The farmers would go out and plant their crops and start farming. This whole cycle was so predictable that the Egyptians made a calendar to predict when the Nile flooding would come again. Their calendar was about 365 days long, just like our modern calendar. The good farmland with the silt in it was called Kemet, which means black land. The rest of the dry desert was called the red land. Before Egypt was unified, it was split into two kingdoms, Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt. The king of Upper Egypt wore a white crown and the king of Lower Egypt wore a red crown. The two kingdoms had many battles and wars. King Narmer of the Upper Kingdom led his army to conquer the Lower Kingdom. When he united all of Egypt, he wore both the white and the red crown to symbolize the unity of both kingdoms. The king made his capital in Memphis in Lower Egypt, not in Tennessee. The king of Egypt was called Pharaoh. Egypt had many pharaohs throughout history, including some women pharaohs like Cleopatra. Many pharaohs also carried a shepherd's crook to show that they were the leader of the people and they should be followed. The pharaoh was so powerful that he was even viewed as one of the gods. The Egyptians worshipped many gods besides just the pharaoh. Amun-Ra was the god of the sun. Osiris was the judge of the dead. Isis was the goddess of healing and motherhood. Hapi was the god of the Nile. Dua was the god of toilets. Yep, you heard that right. The Egyptians were polytheistic and worshipped many gods, even some weird ones. The Egyptian religion was a celebration of life. In the Egyptian religion, the afterlife was really important. They believed that a person would go on to live again after they died. They believed you needed to take some things with you from this life. One of the things you need is your dead body, but no one wants their body to be just a skeleton or all rotten and decomposed in the afterlife, so they created a way to preserve the body as best they could. This process was called embalming and mummification. Take a dead body, cut out its organs, dry it out with spices, wrap it up, and it becomes a mummy. It was really difficult and expensive to make a mummy. The Egyptian priests were the experts on embalming. It took almost two months of work to do it right. First, they would wash the body and get it clean. Then, they cut out all the organs like the liver, stomach, lungs, and intestines and wrapped them up, dry them, and put them in special jars called canopic jars. Each jar was shaped like a specific god. The brain was sometimes removed through the nose with a little hook. The heart is taken out, but after it gets washed and wrapped, they put it back in the mummy's chest. The body is then covered with salt and spices to dry it for over 40 days. After that, they uncover the body and wash it again with oil and spices. Then they wrap it up in linen cloths. A special mask is then put on the mummy's face so the gods can recognize him in the afterlife. Without the mask, I guess everyone would look the same in their mummy wraps. Some mummies were just buried in the ground, but a pharaoh mummy gets an extra special treatment. They put the pharaoh mummy in a gold coffin with a face painted on the outside. Then they put that coffin inside a wooden coffin to protect it. And finally, they put the wood coffin inside a stone coffin called the sarcophagus. The sarcophagus had a huge heavy lid that took lots of workers to move it into place. Along with the sarcophagus, the pharaoh would be buried with all sorts of things that he might need in the afterlife, like food, furniture, jewelry, treasure, anything useful he might want to have, even his pets. All of this was placed in the biggest container of all, a pyramid. The pyramids of ancient Egypt are the graves of the pharaohs. The Great Pyramid is the largest pyramid in Egypt. It's part of the Giza Pyramid Complex, or Giza Necropolis, the City of the Dead. These pyramids are near modern-day Cairo. The complex has three large pyramids, some smaller ones, and the Great Sphinx. The Great Pyramid was built around 2600 BCE for the pharaoh Khufu, who was sometimes called Cheops. This pyramid took around 20 years to build and more than 2 million stones. Each stone weighs around 5,000 pounds, or 2,200 kilograms. Moving these huge stones from the place they were cut to the pyramid was a huge task and took hundreds of thousands of men. We believe that some of these workers were slaves, but lots of the workers were paid skilled laborers and craftsmen as well. We're not completely sure how the stones were moved, but many researchers think that they were rolled on logs, put on big sleds, and pulled by ropes, and pushed up ramps to put them into place. How do you think they were moved? The Great Pyramid was so big, it was the tallest man-made structure in the world for almost 4,000 years. The pyramid used to have beautiful white limestone capstones placed around the edges, but most of those have eroded and crumbled, and what we see now is just the structure beneath. The inside of a pyramid is very fascinating. The Great Pyramid has three chambers and tunnels that lead to each one. The king was buried in the top chamber here inside his sarcophagus. Long before modern scientists and researchers entered the Great Pyramid, it had been emptied of all its valuables by grave robbers. Too bad. Grave robbers are lame. The Egyptians would sometimes carve or paint messages in the walls of the pyramids. The ancient Egyptian picture writing system is called hieroglyphics. Early Egyptians chiseled their writing into buildings and stelas, so their history is literally written in stone. Many of these carvings survive today and give us almost all the information we have about ancient Egypt. In 1799, a stone tablet was discovered with the same message written in three different scripts, hieroglyphics, Demotic Egyptian, and Ancient Greek. This helped scholars interpret many of the hieroglyphic symbols because they knew the Greek. This tablet is called the Rosetta Stone. Later, Egyptians used a type of paper to write messages and keep records. They would take the river reed plants called papyrus and soften them up and smash them into pulp. Then the pulp was rolled out into sheets to make a type of paper. Papyrus paper was great because it was so light and easy to roll up and store. This was really convenient for transporting documents or storing large amounts of writing in a library, for example. However, when papyrus gets wet, the ink can smear and the papyrus itself can even dissolve. For this reason, most of the papyrus writings of ancient Egypt are lost to history. Most of the history we have tells us about the pharaohs and the gods, but what about the average person in Egypt? First of all, ancient Egyptians didn't walk like that, but they did love to dance. They would sing and play instruments to celebrate. They had sports that they played including running, swimming, rowing, archery, and more. They worshipped their gods in their homes by caring for statues of them and offering them food. Most people in Egypt were farmers. During the flood season, many of the farmers would work to help with the building projects, like the pyramids, and they were likely paid for it. Some wealthy parents would send their children to school where they learned writing, reading, math, and manners. Some grew up and became scribes, scholars, and priests. Most kids learned to work from their parents and took over the family business as they got older. They didn't have phones, video games, cars, or even YouTube. Kids spent most of their time outside playing with friends or helping their parents do work. Even though a lot of things that come to mind when we think of Egypt surround death, Egyptian life was really a celebration of life. They loved life. In fact, their religious beliefs showed that they wanted to keep living their same life after death. Death itself was another part of the grand journey of life. Hopefully, learning about Egypt made you curious about history. Thank you so much for watching to the end. These videos take a ton of work, so do us a solid, please. Reach down now and click that like button and then the subscribe button. We really need your support to grow and make these history videos even better. Also, there's links in the description for more learning resources and books about Egypt. See you next time and thank you!