Contributions and Legacy
Egypt has given us a good understanding of our world. They have left a legacy and many contributions of their world. One contribution to our world today is the calendar. The ancient Egyptians created a calendar based on the 360 days of the year. They realized that the Egyptians needed the year to fit their seasons. They had three seasons in there year that they needed to work around. Flooding, planting, and harvesting are all of the seasons that the Egyptians had that worked for there type of living. To fit it all in though they were five days short. They added the holy days to honor and thank the gods. This changed the year to being 365 days instead of 360. This is what gave us the 365 days of the calendar.
Another contribution is papyrus. Papyrus is a weed found along the Nile river bank. This weed can grow about 10 feet tall. The Egyptians used papyrus for paper, baskets, footwear, mats, blankets, mattresses, medicine, food, clothes, and perfume. The papyrus was very important to the egyptians. At one point, they even try to build boats with papyrus because of how good and useful it was. They did find out though that papyrus absorbs water so boats didn't work out. They would make paper and books all using the papyrus weed. To protect the writing they would beat it to pulp twice, dry it twice, and since it would still absorb water, they would roll it into a cylinder with the writing in side to protect important writing.
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Another contribution was the Obelisk. An obelisk was a giant monument made out of stone, they were a big tall statue maybe 70 feet high or higher with a pyramid on top. On the sides there was writing telling stories or tales of ancient Egypt. We have our own obelisks too in the United States. In Washington DC, we have a monument or obelisk to honor our first president, George Washington. This monument was built using 36,000 huge blocks of stone and is 555 feet tall!
The tomb of an Egyptian pharaoh was called a Pyramid. A pyramid was a monumental structure with a square bottom and four sloping sides that meet at a point. In this case Egyptian pyramids were built out of heavy blocks of stone.The weight of each stone was at least 2.5 tons so it took twenty years for building the pyramid. When a pharaoh died they mummified his or her body and placed it in a stone box called a sarcophagus. The box was placed in the middle room of the pyramid and wall carvings around the room told the life story of the pharaohs history. Over 5,000 years ago scribes wrote down documents using picture, these were called hieroglyphs. But Egyptians loved writing things down, and hieroglyphs took a long time to write, so they made a new language called Demotic script. In the beginning when people first found the hieroglyphs they couldn't read them, but they eventually found a stone with a story on it written in Greek. The story was also written in hieroglyphics and demotic script. This stone is called the Rosetta Stone
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