Tagged: ancient egyptian history
Lazy Sundays: Revolutions Podcast
After Mike Duncan’s amazing podcast The History of Rome I was pretty disappointed. It had been a great podcast that got me through a lot of boring days at work and on the weekends and I was sad to see it go. At the same time, I was pretty eager to see what Mike Duncan was going to do next. Enter Revolutions.
Revolutions is a podcast chronicling several different revolutions throughout world history. It starts with the English Revolution and once that was done we moved on to the American Revolution. Currently we’re on the insanely complicated French Revolution and I couldn’t be happier. Mike Duncan makes history so accessible to the average person and although he gaffes sometimes, his research is very thorough and is usually spot-on. He combines both humour and fact to make what I thought were boring events absolutely fascinating. So every Sunday like today I eagerly await the newest episode of Revolutions.
If you like podcasts in general or you love history, I can’t recommend it enough. It’s free on iTunes and he runs a sort of voluntary donation service where you can do a one time donation or a monthly donation in appreciation for his efforts. It’s pretty cool and you can check it out on his official site.
Now if you’ll excuse me I’ll be refreshing the Revolutions feed on iTunes every hour or so until the new episode comes out.
Forgotten Figures: Imhotep
No, this Imhotep is not the priest from The Mummy (1999). Imhotep was an ancient Egyptian man who took a simple enough idea that had developed over the centuries and turned it up a notch to create what was then the world’s largest stone building. He is forgotten by all but Egyptologists and amateur enthusiastic historians but in his own time and for centuries afterward, he was a legend as an architect and healer. Eventually, he would become a god.
One of the few images of Imhotep, currently housed at the Louvre.
Background
Imhotep lived and came to prominence in the reign of Djoser, which happened circa 2650 B.C. His origins are largely unknown but classical historians put his town of birth at Gebelein, which was south of ancient Thebes in Upper Egypt. Still others put his birthplace at Ankhtow, a suburb of Memphis in the north (Lower Egypt). So I think we can safely say that no one has any firm idea where this man came from. What we do know is that Imhotep was born into a fascinating and complicated time.
This was the early period of ancient Egypt, before all the famous pharaohs like Ramses II and Tutankhamun. No, those people lived in the 19th and 18th Dynasties respectively while Djoser is considered the first pharaoh of the Third Dynasty. These people lived more than a thousand years apart and Egypt was not yet the powerhouse it would become in the New Kingdom. Narmer had united Upper and Lower Egypt circa 2900 B. C. so the country was fairly new when you compare it to what it would eventually become: a three thousand year long relatively successful regional power. The art compared to the Middle and New Kingdom art was basic and architecture was just in its infancy but Imhotep would help bring along a sort of renaissance that we would call the Pyramid age. That’s still a little farther off in Egyptian history than we’ll cover today, however.