Civilizations · 3,000 years
The Entire History of Ancient Egypt
If the whole history of ancient Egypt were a river 3,000 kilometres long, with each kilometre one year, the Great Pyramid would stand at kilometre 540 and Cleopatra just before the sea. Cleopatra lived closer in time to us than to the workers who built the Great Pyramid.
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What it covers
The documentary travels down a river three thousand kilometres long in which each kilometre is a year. Before the first dynasty come the Green Sahara and the villages of the Nile; at kilometre zero, Narmer unites the Two Lands.
Downstream appear the first pyramids and the Great Pyramid, with the Diary of Merer and the lost branch of the Nile; the famine that brought down the Old Kingdom; the Hyksos; Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Nefertiti and Tutankhamun; Ramesses II and the first strike in history; the pharaohs of Kush, Alexandria and the Rosetta Stone.
The journey ends with Cleopatra, and with Champollion, who learned to read hieroglyphs again fourteen centuries later.
Chapters and timeline
Select a chapter to jump to that moment in the documentary.
Sources
The specific facts in the documentary (dates, sites, figures) come from these sources.
- The Green Sahara and its drying: Kuper and Kröpelin 2006, Science · doi:10.1126/science.1130989
- Nabta Playa: Malville et al. 1998, Nature · doi:10.1038/33131
- Chronology of the first dynasties: Dee et al. 2013, Proceedings of the Royal Society A · doi:10.1098/rspa.2013.0395
- Radiocarbon chronology of dynastic Egypt: Bronk Ramsey et al. 2010, Science · doi:10.1126/science.1189395
- The last mammoths, on Wrangel Island: Vartanyan et al. 1993, Nature · doi:10.1038/362337a0
- The Diary of Merer and the harbour at Wadi al-Jarf: P. Tallet, Les papyrus de la mer Rouge I (IFAO, 2017)
- The lost branch of the Nile beside the pyramids: Ghoneim et al. 2024, Communications Earth & Environment · doi:10.1038/s43247-024-01379-7; Sheisha et al. 2022, PNAS · doi:10.1073/pnas.2202530119
- The void and corridor in the Great Pyramid (muons): Morishima et al. 2017, Nature · doi:10.1038/nature24647; Procureur et al. 2023, Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-023-36351-0
- Failed floods at the end of the Old Kingdom: Stanley et al. 2003, Geoarchaeology · doi:10.1002/gea.10065
- Who were the Hyksos: Stantis et al. 2020, PLOS ONE · doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0235414
- The death of Seqenenre Tao: Saleem and Hawass 2021, Frontiers in Medicine · doi:10.3389/fmed.2021.637527
- Where was Punt (mummified baboons): Dominy et al. 2020, eLife · doi:10.7554/eLife.60860
- The commoners' cemetery at Amarna: Kemp et al. 2013, Antiquity · doi:10.1017/S0003598X00048626
- The DNA of Tutankhamun's family: Hawass et al. 2010, JAMA · doi:10.1001/jama.2010.121
- The death of Ramesses III: Hawass et al. 2012, BMJ · doi:10.1136/bmj.e8268
- The spread of Egyptian cats: Ottoni et al. 2017, Nature Ecology & Evolution · doi:10.1038/s41559-017-0139
- Volcanoes, Nile floods and revolts: Manning et al. 2017, Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-017-00957-y
- The Deir el-Medina strike: the Turin Strike Papyrus, Museo Egizio (Cat. 1880)
- Ancient accounts: Herodotus, Histories, books II and IV; Plutarch, Life of Antony
About the images
The images are of two kinds: real photographs of archaeological sites, museum objects and historical archives, and AI-generated recreations that illustrate what archaeology and history tell us. Researched and reviewed script; produced with the help of AI tools.
