About the Author
----------------
Ken Jennings grew up in Seoul, South Korea, where he
became a daily devotee of the quiz show Jeopardy! In 2004, he
successfully auditioned for a spot on the show and went on an
unprecedented seventy-four game victory streak worth $2.52
million. Jennings’s book Brainiac, about
his Jeopardy! adventures, was a critically accled New York
Times bestseller, as were his follow-up books head and Because
I Said So! He is also the author of Planet Funny. Jennings lives
in Seattle with his wife Mindy and two children.
Mike Lowery is an illustrator and fine artist whose work has been
seen in galleries and publications internationally. Mike is the
illustrator of Moo Hoo and Ribbit Rabbit by Candace Ryan; The
Gingerbread Man Loose in the School by Laura Murray; and the
Doctor Proctor’s Fart Powder novels by Jo Nesbø. Currently he is
a professor of illustration at the Savannah College of Art and
Design in Atlanta, Georgia, where he lives with a lovely German
frau, Katrin, and his super genius daughter, Allister. Visit him
at MikeLowery.com.
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Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
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Ancient Egypt
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THE BLACK LAND
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. . . And now we’re in the year 3500 BC, the very end of the
Stone Age. Here are some things that haven’t been invented yet:
Bronze
Written language
The wheel
The world population is less than fifteen million. In our time
that’s about the population of the Los Angeles area. But here in
3500 BC, that’s every single human being on earth.
The fall of Troy is more than two thousand years in the future.
The Vikings are more than four thousand years away. It goes
without saying that your parents and teachers haven’t been born
yet, so don’t bother doing your homework tonight.
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DRY, DRY AGAIN
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Let’s say that we’ve traveled in space as well as time. We’re now
in Africa, in the hottest desert on earth—the Sahara.
But the Sahara wasn’t always a desert. If we traveled back in
time five thousand more years, we’d find a very different Sahara.
Back then the Sahara was a grassy savannah. There was plenty of
rain, thanks to monsoon winds from the Mediterranean and melting
glaciers from the previous ice age.
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But around 4000 BC, that all changed. The rains stopped, the
grass died, lakes and rivers dried up. Once the grasses were
gone, the soil blew away, leaving only baked sand underneath.
Pretty much everyone left or died.
DELTA FORCE
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But our story doesn’t end there, or this would be the worst
time-travel trip ever!
It’s time to meet the main character in our story, the one who
made Egyptian civilization happen. This character isn’t a priest
or a pharaoh or one of those gods with the weird animal heads.
It’s a river.
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The Nile River is one of the longest rivers in the world. It runs
more than half the length of Africa, from high in the ains
of Rwanda down to the Mediterranean Sea. That’s more than 4,000
miles, longer than the border between the contiguous United
States and Canada.
EXTRA CREDIT
The Nile was long believed to be the world’s longest river, but
in 2001 a group of National Geographic explorers climbed an
extinct volcano in the Andes ains of South America and
discovered a new source for the River. It now looks like the
might be a teensy bit longer than the Nile— by a hundred miles or
fewer.
During the last one hundred miles of the Nile’s journey to the
sea, it spreads out into a web of smaller rivers that drain into
the Mediterranean. Areas like this are often triangular in shape,
like the Greek letter delta, so they’re called river deltas.
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When the Sahara was nice and green, the Nile delta was a terrible
swamp that everyone stayed away from. But as the desert dried
out, nomadic hunters migrated down to the river to find game. The
Nile valley turned into a pretty great place to live.
Well, maybe “pretty great” is overstating things a bit. The
Egyptian desert certainly has its good points and its bad points.
BAD POINTS
The sand is crawling with venomous scorpions and snakes.
Blisteringly hot winds called khamsin blow in from the south
every spring, causing sandstorms.
In the fall, locusts buzz in to eat your crops-but you get only
about an inch of rain every year, so you might not have crops
anyway.
The river is full of deadly hippos and crocodiles.
GOOD POINTS
The Nile rises twenty-three feet every summer, flooding the
valley.
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That’s right: Life in Egypt is so hard that an annual flood is as
good as it gets!
Let me explain.
A RIVER FLOODS THROUGH IT
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When the Nile flooded every June, it left behind a layer of black
dirt called silt. Date palms and fig trees grew in this fertile
soil. Farmers could wheat and barley there. The early
Egyptians called their valley Kemet, meaning “the black land.”
The black land was only a mile wide in some places. Everything
beyond was endless sand—Deshret, “the red land.”
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BLACK IS BEAUTIFUL
Because of the color of Kemet’s fertile soil, black was the color
of good luck in Egypt. Many of the statues of gods we’ve found in
Egyptian tombs are painted with black resin. The color red was
the site: It meant trouble. On an Egyptian red
symbols meant something bad had happened on that day-or was about
to.
These floods were the only thing that made life in ancient Egypt
possible. For the Egyptians, each year had three seasons:
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The Egyptians didn’t know the Nile’s rise was because of snow
melting in the ains of southern Africa. In fact, they’d
never even heard of snow. They thought the floods were caused by
a goddess crying.
About once every five years, the Nile didn’t deposit enough silt,
and there would be a famine. Egypt’s priests were in charge of
assuring a good summer flood, and they took the job seriously.
They learned that the appearance of the star Sirius in the sky
just before dawn meant that flood season was beginning. They also
invented measuring sticks called nilometers to predict the
strength of the flood.
So the flooding helped Egypt develop science.
Some years the flood would be so strong that it would wash away
fields and villages. Towns had to band together to build dikes
that would keep back the Nile, as well as canals to manage and
share the irrigation water. So the flooding helped unite Egypt as
well.
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EXTRA CREDIT
In the 1960s Egypt spent $1 billion to build the Aswan High Dam,
a massive two-mile-long wall of dirt and rocks across the Nile
River. The dam produces electricity and helps prevent drought.
But it also means that, after thousands of years, the annual
flooding of the Nile River has finally ended.
UP IS DOWN
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The Nile River, like the vast Sahara desert, helped keep Egypt
isolated from the rest of the Middle East. Head downstream toward
the delta, and you’d reach impassable marshes. Head upstream, and
you’d hit waterfalls and rapids. As a result, throughout their
history the Egyptians mostly kept to themselves. That’s one
reason their culture was so amazing and unique.
But in the beginning there wasn’t one Egypt. There were two.
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Does it bother you that Lower Egypt is upper and Upper Egypt is
lower? If so, please turn this book upside down.
The names refer to altitude, my friends. Upper Egypt is uphill;
Lower Egypt is closer to sea level. But many Egyptian makers
did orient their charts with south at the top of the page, the
site of what we do today. It was just common sense in Egypt:
The river flows down, so we’ll put north at the bottom of the
page. In fact, when an Egyptian army invaded Syria in 1525 BC,
the soldiers freaked out when they realized some rivers in other
countries flowed “backward”—that is, south. For us it would be
like seeing a river flow uphill.
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POP QUIZ!
The soldiers were also amazed in Syria to see “the Nile falling
from the sky.” What were they describing?
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COME TOGETHER
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Around 3100 BC, Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt were successfully
united into one nation. In Egyptian legends the heroic king who
did this is called Menes.
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The ruler of Upper Egypt wore a white crown featuring a vulture
(representing the goddess Nekhbet).
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The ruler of Lower Egypt wore a red crown, which featured a cobra
(representing their goddess Wadjet).
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The rulers of a unified Egypt combined the two crowns into one
awesome vulture-cobra supercrown—the Sekhmeti, meaning “two
powerful ones.”
Menes is more of a legendary founder of Egypt than a historical
one, like the way the Romans believed that their city was founded
by twins named Romulus and Remus.
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In reality the king who unified the two Egypts was probably a guy
named Narmer, also known as “the Striking Catfish.”
After bringing the two Egypts together, Menes or Narmer (or
whatever his name was) now ruled over the world’s largest unified
nation. He was the most powerful man on earth.
EXTRA CREDIT
In one legend about Menes, he was attacked one day by his own
dogs while out hunting. Desperate to get away from them, he
jumped onto the back of a crocodile, which carried him to safety.
In gratitude to the croc god, Menes went on to found the great
city of Crocodilopolis, where you could go to worship sacred,
bejeweled crocodiles.
Obviously, the best part of this story is that the ancient
Egyptians had a city called Crocodilopolis, which is the coolest
thing ever. It’s also fun to say. Let’s all say “Crocodilopolis”
out loud a few times.
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GIFTS OF THE NILE
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The Greek historian Herodotus called Egypt “the gift of the
Nile,” because they owed their whole civilization to the river.
In fact, “Nile” is a Greek word—the Egyptians just called the
Nile Iteru, meaning “the river.” For them it was the only one in
the world!
As Egypt grew into a great nation, the Nile continued to provide
the inhabitants with gifts.
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In a desert with hardly any trees, you can’t build things out of
wood. The Egyptians solved that problem by making mud pies! They
would bring big lumps of mud and clay in from the Nile wrapped in
animal skins. Then they’d add straw and pebbles and pack it into
wooden molds. After baking in the sun for almost a month, the mud
became bricks that the Egyptians used to build everything, from
the lowliest peasant’s house to some of the pharaoh’s temples.
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In the shallow waters by the banks of the Nile, a tall reed
called Cyperus papyrus (“puh-PIE-russ”) grows. As we’ll see later
on, the Egyptians used the fibers of this to make a flat
material they could write on. Our word “paper” comes from
“papyrus.” But the was useful in other ways. The poor could
eat its roots, or carve them into s. It could be burned for
fuel. Its hollow stems floated on water so well that Egyptians
could bundle them up and make their first boats.
EXTRA CREDIT
In 1969 an adventurer named Thor Heyerdahl built a boat out of
papyrus that he used to cross the Atlantic Ocean! He named it the
Ra, after the Egyptian sun god.
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For the most part, the Egyptians thought they lived in the best
place in the world and were happy to stay home. But whatever they
couldn’t get in Egypt, they could trade for along the Nile. From
the south the kingdom of Nubia would trade them luxury goods such
as elephant ivory, gold, and even giraffe tails to use as
flyswatters!
Egypt’s trading ships were no tiny papyrus fishing boats—they
were made of imported wood, and some were as long as 170 feet,
more than twice the size of Columbus’s ships. To trade with
Asia—bringing cinnamon from India, for example, or incense from
Yemen—merchants had to figure out a way to travel from the Nile
to the Red Sea. So they built ships that could be taken apart,
carried overland through a wadi, or dry riverbed, for 120 miles,
and then rebuilt at the coast!
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BECAUSE I’M HAPI
The Egyptians even worshipped the Nile River-in the form of the
god Hapi. “tener of herds!” they would chant. “Might that
fashions all! None can live without him!” Hapi was sort of an
odd-looking guy. He was bright blue in color, like river water.
And to show the life-giving power of the Nile, he was always
drawn with women’s s!
DEEP WATERS
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The Nile had its dangers, of course.
For one thing, its path kept moving. Rivers gradually change
their courses, and the bed of the Nile River moved east about two
or three meters every year. Around 1050 BC, one branch of the
Nile made a massive course change, leaving Pi-Rameses, the
capital of Egypt, high and dry! The pharaohs built a new capital
called Djanet along the new branch of the Nile and ordered the
entire temple of Pi-Rameses moved, one stone at a time, to the
new site, and rebuilt. Some of the statues that had to be moved
weighed more than two hundred tons.
EXTRA CREDIT
“Djanet” is another name for Tanis—the lost Egyptian city that
Indiana Jones is searching for in Raiders of the Lost Ark!
The ancient Egyptians worshipped crocodiles, but that’s mostly
because they were so ed of them. And rightly so! To this day
Nile crocodiles kill hundreds, maybe thousands, of people in
Africa every year. Egyptian sailors had a magical trick they’d
try against crocodiles. They’d point at them with their index
finger and little finger.
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Needless to say, Junior Geniuses, if you’re ever facing down a
crocodile, I would not rely on that trick. It sounds like a good
way to get two of your fingers bitten off.
Even more dangerous than the crocodile, believe it or not, is the
hippopotamus. If you think hippos are just y, peaceful river
lumps, they’ve got you fooled. Hippos can be aggressive, they’re
not afraid of people, they run faster than you can, and they like
to overturn boats and chomp on people with their twenty-inch-long
teeth. Twenty inches? That’s about as long as your arm!
In fact, the Egyptians said that their famous first king, Menes,
ruled sixty-two years and was finally mauled to death by a
hippopotamus. Wow. When you think about it, that’s a pretty
action-packed way to die for a guy in his eighties.
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THE BIRTH OF A NATION
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However, the civilization Menes founded lived on long after his
death. His was just the first of many dynasties (royal families)
that ruled Egypt over the next three thousand years. Three
thousand years! That’s longer than Western civilization has
lasted, from ancient Greece right up until today.
Let’s meet the kings and queens who ran the world for centuries.
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