World History

Unit 1: The Beginnings of Civilization

Chapter 2: The First Civilizations

Mon, Sep 16, 2013

5. Tue, Sep 17, 2013

One of the things to appreciate about ancient Egyptian civilization is — at the risk of belaboring the obvious — just how vast a period of time it covered. Between the first glimmerings of literate culture on the Nile and the end of the New Kingdom, nearly two thousand years passed. That’s about as long as it’s been since the time of Christ. No political entity on the globe today is even remotely as old. What kinds of things can account for the extraordinary longevity of this culture and political institution?

What do you make of the gods of the Egyptian pantheon? Most of the Western European pantheons (Greek, Norse, Celtic) depict basically anthropomorphic gods — that is, they were in human form, and looked like human men and women. The Egyptian deities, however, were more typically a mixture of man and beast in form. If you have read any of the mythological material of the Egyptian tradition, come ready to share that with the rest of the class.

Because many or most of us see the Hebrew tradition as part of our own background — Judaic thought and the covenant with Abraham, etc., undergird much of Christianity — some of us may be inclined to see it as something apart from everything else that goes on here. Certainly to those of us who believe in that covenant and what grew out of it, it is unique in its significance. At the same time, there's a tendency to envision the history of the Jews as something that happens “in the Bible”. To some extent, that's false: it may have been recorded in various books of the Bible, but it happened out here in the real world along with everything else. This chapter invites us to see these events in the unfolding context of the other peoples and civilizations of the Middle East. There are two reasons for this: it allows you to use what you already know as leverage against what you don't know, but it also allows you to integrate those various pieces of the puzzle into something that makes sense.

• If Abraham went to Ur of the Chaldees, when does that make him active?
• What does it mean that the children of Israel sojourned in Egypt for a while? What Egyptian Kingdom was that likely to have been?
• When the Book of Kings tells us that David contrived the death of Uriah the Hittite, who are the Hittites?
• When the Bible recounts the Babylonian Captivity, what kingdom is this?
• What role did Cyrus the Great of the Persians play respecting the Hebrews?

Contents of this page © Copyright 2011, 2012 by Paul Christiansen and Bruce A. McMenomy.
Permission to download or print this page is hereby given to members of Scholars Online for purposes of personal study only. All other use constitutes a violation of copyright.