Egyptian civilization rested on a river. People had settled along the Nile and begun organized farming by about 6000 BCE. Every summer the Nile flooded its banks and left a layer of rich dark soil, and until the Aswan High Dam was finished in 1970, the Nile flooded the valley every year. Farmers dug irrigation canals to carry water to farms and villages, and used the shaduf, a simple machine that raised water from the river into canals. Peasant farmers made up about 80% of the population and provided the resources that the rest of society lived on. Crops were harvested and stored locally, and a portion was collected by the state as taxes paid in grain. Around 3100 B.C., a king named Narmer united the lands of Upper and Lower Egypt into one country. Kings of Upper Egypt wore a tall white crown called the hedjet and kings of Lower Egypt a short red crown called the deshret, and the Narmer Palette is the first work of art to show a king wearing both. Egyptologists are not sure whether Narmer or a king called Menes was the first pharaoh; Menes was an honorific title, and many think the two were the same person.

The Old Kingdom, about 2613 to 2181 BCE, is known as the "Age of the Pyramids." Djoser's Step Pyramid complex at Saqqara was the earliest construction of its size in world history made fully of stone. Imhotep designed it under Djoser; it was made of limestone blocks instead of mud brick, and it rose 204 feet, the tallest structure of its time; a king named Sneferu needed three attempts to build the first smooth-sided pyramid, and the Pyramid of Meidum was the first true pyramid built in Egypt, though the Red Pyramid was the first successful one. At Giza, three generations of kings built three giant tombs: Khufu, his son Khafre and a later king, Menkaure. Until the Eiffel Tower was finished in 1889, the Great Pyramid was the tallest structure on Earth built by human hands; it held that record for over 3,000 years.

How was the Great Pyramid made? It has more than two million stone blocks, and an average block weighs about 2.5 tons; the smooth white outer stone was limestone from a quarry at Tura, about 8 miles away, while granite beams for the inner chambers were quarried at Aswan, hundreds of miles south along the Nile; the cut blocks were likely placed on sledges and pulled by teams of men or cattle; about a dozen men pulled a sledge carrying a 2-ton block. No mortar was used to hold the blocks in place. Most researchers agree that building the pyramids used ramps of some kind, though they argue about what shape the ramps took. Hemiunu, Khufu's vizier and nephew, is credited with the design and building of the Great Pyramid, whose white limestone covering fell away long ago and was reused as building material for the city of Cairo.

Who did the work? Egypt did have slaves, at the bottom of its social ladder, but the pyramids and other monuments were built by Egyptian laborers. Excavations have found no evidence of forced labor on the pyramids. Archaeologists at Giza found not one workers' town but two, side by side; the first grew slowly, and Mark Lehner suspects it was the settlement of permanent workers. His team removed sand with trucks and front-end loaders and, by his account, exposed about five hectares of the workers' city. The papyri found at Wadi al-Jarf speak for the builders themselves. In 2013, a team found 30 papyri at that ancient port on the Red Sea, the oldest inscribed papyrus ever found. They include a diary kept by an inspector named Merer, who led a crew of about 40 men on boats that carried limestone from the Tura quarries to Akhet Khufu, the Great Pyramid; the papyri show that at least some workers in Khufu's time were skilled and well rewarded for their work; the Tura blocks were the sort used to encase the Great Pyramid, but they were most likely used as roofing for one of the pits near the pyramid.

Later, the craftsmen who built and decorated the royal tombs lived with their families in a village called Deir el-Medina; it was a planned village founded by Amenhotep I; its walled part held 68 houses on 1.4 acres, and it had no central well, so water was brought in daily; the men worked in ten-day stretches and then had two days off. Villagers traded with each other: one worker might build a roof addition for a house in exchange for a sack of grain or a jug of beer, as pottery-shard notes called ostraca show. In the reign of Ramesses III, the tomb workers went on strike when their pay was 18 days late; it is called the first recorded strike in history. They shouted "We are hungry!", sat in near the temple of Thutmose III, and later blocked all access to the Valley of the Kings, and the back pay was finally handed over after negotiations; the record of the strike comes from a papyrus scroll found at Deir el-Medina.

In the New Kingdom, pharaohs were buried in tombs cut into rock in the Valley of the Kings, on the Nile's west bank near Luxor; the entrances were well hidden, yet nearly all of the valley's known royal tombs were likely robbed, and tomb robbing was a serious problem in ancient Egypt; many thought the 62 tombs found before 1922 were all the valley held, but in 2005 a team led by Otto Schaden found the valley's first unknown tomb since Tutankhamun's; the Egyptians believed the afterlife would be almost exactly like life on Earth, so tombs were filled with things a person would need there, such as food and games. In the best mummification process, used for royals and top officials, the whole process lasted about 70 days. Embalmers dried the body with natron, packed it with linen, natron pouches, herbs, sawdust, sand or chopped straw, covered it with a resin coating and wrapped it in linen bandages, often with amulets tucked in; the lungs, stomach, liver and intestines were embalmed separately and put into canopic jars; the heart was usually left in the body.

Tutankhamun became king when he was a child, and he ruled for less than ten years. His father was Akhenaten, who moved the capital from Thebes to a new city, Akhetaten, now called Amarna; after Akhenaten, Tutankhamun's reforms returned Egypt to its traditional belief structure. Tutankhamun died at about age 18, and his general Horemheb later ruled and had his name erased from the record. Experts of Howard Carter's day said every tomb in the valley had been raided or found, but Carter refused to give up, although his funding from the Earl of Carnarvon was nearly gone; he found the tomb in November 1922, and more than 5,000 treasures came from it. As of November 2026, it is described as the most intact pharaoh's tomb ever found; the Curse of Tutankhamun, by contrast, has no basis in fact.

Egypt's rulers left their marks in stone. Hatshepsut ruled for more than twenty years as a pharaoh, and later Thutmose III moved to erase her from the historical record, including removing her name from the list of kings. Ramesses II ruled for 66 years; he led an army to Kadesh, was tricked by spies, and fought a battle both sides claimed to win; after years of talks he signed a peace treaty with the Hittites, the earliest peace accord whose text has survived. Alexander the Great took Egypt from the Persians in 332 BCE and was welcomed as a liberator; he founded Alexandria in 331 BCE; its lighthouse, the Pharos, was one of the seven wonders of the ancient world. Ptolemy I, a Macedonian, founded the Ptolemaic Dynasty, which ruled Egypt until the death of Cleopatra VII in 30 BCE. Cleopatra learned Egyptian and, by one account, was fluent in it. Antony and Cleopatra were beaten by Octavian at the Battle of Actium in 31 BCE, and Cleopatra died in 30 BCE. As of November 2026, archaeologists have not found the mausoleum where she and probably Antony died. Egypt then became a province of Rome.

For many years hieroglyphs were not understood at all; the Rosetta Stone, dated 196 BCE, carries a decree about Ptolemy V, passed by a council of priests, in hieroglyphic, Demotic and Greek. Egyptians used more than one script: hieroglyphs, a simpler cursive script called hieratic, and later demotic, which replaced hieratic except for religious and funerary writing; the Englishman Thomas Young first identified some of the hieroglyphs on the stone. Champollion, who was fluent in Coptic, the language that replaced hieroglyphs in later Egypt, found the name of Ptolemy V by comparing the hieroglyphs with the Greek translation, and in 1822 he announced that he had deciphered hieroglyphic writing, showing that it mixed signs for sounds with signs for meanings; some people say the stone is controversial as a spoil of war and colonial expansion, and it is only a fragment of a larger stele that is now lost.

Words to know

• irrigation: watering system
• mortar: stone glue
• embalmers: body preservers
• ostraca: pottery notes
• deciphered: decoded