The three pyramids at Giza were built circa 2500 B.C. as “resurrection machines;” the largest of them belonged to Fourth Dynasty king Khufu. The ancient Egyptians were greatly preoccupied with afterlife, and each Egyptian held out hope for being resurrected after death to join an eternal circle of regeneration and rebirth with the sun god Ra and with Osiris, lord of the dead. But the way to the next world was fraught with peril. One had to circumvent demons who waited to sideline the unguarded. Safe passage depended upon being prepared. The kings of Egypt built the pyramids as enormous mausolea in their bid for eternal life. The pyramids acted as waystations in which kings would undergo transfiguration into an eternal spirit called akh.

Despite the fact that Herodotus’ History was not written until the fifth century B.C., the Greek historian is nonetheless an important source for understanding the ancient Egyptian world. Herodotus was enamored of the Egyptians, their culture and customs, ethnography, and geography. He was frankly in awe of Egyptian civilization. In his History, Herodotus described Egyptian social customs and expectations for the behavior and appearance of men and women. He also examined Egyptian religious observance and rites such as circumcision and sacrifice in great detail, and he wrote about the practices of priests.

Queen Hatshepsut (1473-1458 B.C.) was regent of Egypt after the death of her husband Thutmose I and of her brother and husband, Thutmose II. During the minority of Thutmose III, Hatshepsut ruled as queen. Two years into her rule, she had herself crowned king and occupied this position for twenty years. Her rule was a sharp departure from Egyptian tradition. As such, Hatshepsut was under pressure to legitimize her position. Officially, the female king's assumption of power was said to have been sanctioned by Amun-Ra, who had prophesied her assumption of power.

Queen Hatshepsut, daughter of the popular eighteenth-dynasty ruler Thutmose I, gained the regency of Egypt when her brother (and husband) Thutmose II, died prematurely. Thutmose II had a son by a consort, and while that son, Thutmose III, grew to adulthood, Hatshepsut ruled Egypt. Her rule was not uncontested, however, and she had to struggle to assert her legitimacy as regent. Inscriptions on obelisks Hatshepsut erected around the tomb of her father at Karnak testify to this. In these inscriptions, the queen made two energetic points: she affirmed her devotion to her earthly father and to her divine father, the god Amun. She maintained that Amun had destined her to be king. Her use of masculine and feminine designations in describing herself suggest that she considered herself to be both son and daughter to Amun.

The Egyptians had a pictographic writing system called hieroglyphics: some of the symbols in the system represented complete words, while others signified sounds or combinations of sounds. Recent discoveries have shown that the Egyptians were most likely the first to have a writing system, challenging the view that the Sumerians were first. The advent of writing in Egypt corresponds with the advent of the Egyptian state, which required a writing system to record bureaucratic and administrative projects. Indeed, the earliest uses of hieroglyphics were to record the receipt of taxes. The discovery of the Rosetta Stone (near Alexandria in 1799), which bore inscriptions in both Greek and in Egyptian, enabled Thomas Young and Jean-François Champollion to decipher hieroglyphics in the early nineteenth century.

The Book of the Dead is one of the best representations scholars have today of the religious beliefs and funereal practices of ancient Egyptians. The incantations contained within the Book of the Dead were intended to be learned by rote during the lifetime of an Egyptian, but later, customs changed and permitted scrolls containing the passages to be buried with the mummy, or preserved corpse of the deceased. Numerous authors and compilers contributed to this lengthy work, which includes magic spells designed to aid the dead in their passage from this world to the afterlife.

The Nile River played a fundamental role in the lives of Egyptians; their calendar was even organized around the seasons of the great river. In the Egyptian calendar, thirty-day months made up twelve-month years. The year was subdivided into three seasons, the “inundation,” or flood season; the “emergence,” when the waters receded and crops could be planted; and the “dry time,” when building projects and harvesting could be accomplished. Life on the Nile was precarious and could vacillate between the chaos produced by drought or flooding, and order. But it also yielded great benefits, as the Greek historian Herodotus remarked. Herodotus wrote, "[the Egyptians] obtain the fruits of the field with less trouble than any other people in the world."

In addition to their earthly roles as warriors and statesmen, the pharaohs, or kings of Egypt, had crucial, spiritual significance. They were regarded as gods on earth. According to legend, the goddess Ma’at was the daughter of the god of creation. She was thought to dwell on earth, and the responsibility for her supervision was the domain of the pharaoh, her brother. Thus the fate of the pharaohs and that of the gods were linked. The pharaohs could command enormous armies and order unparalleled building projects, as in the case of the pyramids. In these massive tombs, the pharaohs hoped their spiritual transfiguration and successful crossing into immortality would be accomplished.

The Ebers Papyrus was written around 1500 B.C., and is one of the lengthiest exempla of ancient medical diagnostic and healing practice. It was found in a tomb at Thebes along with another medical text, the Edwin Smith Papyrus, around 1862. There is substantial philological evidence that the Ebers Papyrus was collected from folk texts that are many centuries older than the Ebers itself. At the time the Ebers Papyrus was written, there was no distinction made between science and religion; thus, many of the entries in the Ebers read to a modern person like incantations or magic spells.

Egyptian men, women, and children adorned themselves with jewelry, incorporating amethyst, garnet, jasper, onyx, turquoise, and lapis lazuli, as well as copper, gold, and shells. Amulets of various types were believed to provide their wearer with good luck and ward off evil spirits and injury.

What was the impact of Egyptian civilization on the Greeks? Have racialist biases in scholarship tended to diminish the contribution of Egypt to the civilization of what became the West? Should the history of the Egyptians be incorporated into the history of Africa to a greater extent than has been done in the past? These, and other questions of a related nature, were posed by the publication of Martin Bernal’s Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilization in 1987. The discussion surrounding Professor Bernal's book confirms that one of the most fascinating aspects of the historical enterprise is the enduring relevance that even the most distant pasts can have for present-day society.

The scholarly discussion surrounding Martin Bernal's Black Athena prompted useful questions, questions about the efficacy of using modern notions of race to characterize the peoples of the ancient world; about the nature of the historical discipline and its methodologies; and about notions of cultural fluidity and civilizational borrowing or influence. Professor Mary R. Lefkowitz’s article, “Ancient History, Modern Myths,” demonstrates the evidentiary bases on which historians critique the work of their colleagues.