Ancient Egyptian History — the gods, the pharaohs and the signs on the wall

About three thousand years, from the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3100 BC to the death of Cleopatra in 30 BC, when Egypt became a Roman province. To put that in perspective, Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid. Egyptian religion, art and writing stayed recognisably continuous across that entire span.

Two of them. The Old Kingdom, roughly 2686–2181 BC, built the pyramids — Djoser at Saqqara first, then Giza. The New Kingdom, roughly 1550–1069 BC, built almost everything else on a standard itinerary: Karnak, Luxor Temple, the Valley of the Kings, the Temple of Hatshepsut and Abu Simbel. The riverbank temples you stop at on a Nile cruise — Edfu, Kom Ombo, Philae and Dendera — are later still, built under the Greek Ptolemies.

A little, and it changes the trip. Temple walls are not decoration — they are the same few dozen gods and signs repeated in different arrangements, and once you can pick out Horus, Isis, Anubis, the ankh and a cartouche, the walls start reading as sentences rather than patterns. An hour with our gods and symbols guides before you fly is the highest-return preparation you can do.

The oval loop drawn around a royal name in hieroglyphs, representing a rope tied at one end to protect the king it encircles. Spotting cartouches is the easiest win for a first-time visitor — once you can recognise the shape, you can find the same king's name repeated across a temple, and your guide can tell you which one you are looking at.

It depends what you mean by important. Khufu built the Great Pyramid. Hatshepsut ruled as king and left the most beautiful temple in Egypt. Akhenaten tried to replace the entire religion with one god and failed. Ramesses II reigned for around 66 years and put his own image on more stone than anyone. Tutankhamun mattered little in life and everything to archaeology, because his was the one royal tomb found nearly intact.

Through the Rosetta Stone, found in 1799, which carried the same decree in hieroglyphs, demotic Egyptian and Greek. Because Greek could still be read, scholars had a key — and in 1822 Jean-François Champollion worked out that the script was neither purely pictorial nor purely alphabetic but a mix of sound signs and meaning signs. That ended roughly fourteen centuries in which nobody could read a single Egyptian wall.

That you carried on, provided the preparations were right. The body had to survive, which is why it was mummified; the name had to be spoken, which is why it was carved everywhere; and the heart was weighed against the feather of Maat before Osiris. Pass, and you entered the Field of Reeds. Fail, and the heart was eaten and you simply ceased. Almost everything in a tomb is equipment for that journey.

The Grand Egyptian Museum at Giza for the objects, including the full Tutankhamun collection. The Valley of the Kings for painted tombs, Karnak and Luxor Temple for the scale of New Kingdom religion, Edfu and Philae for temples complete enough to read, and Abu Simbel for what a pharaoh did when he wanted to be remembered. Our 8-day Cairo and Nile cruise covers all of it from $1,640.