Egypt — Speck in Time Archive

30 BCE – 641 CE

For nearly seven centuries Egypt is Rome's granary, then Byzantium's.

51 BCE – 30 BCE

The last Ptolemaic ruler. Her defeat ends Egyptian independence and hands the country to Rome.

305 BCE – 30 BCE

Greek-speaking rulers descended from one of Alexander's generals govern Egypt for three centuries.

1,332 BCE – 1,323 BCE

A minor pharaoh who died young and mattered little — until his tomb was found nearly intact in 1922.

1,550 BCE – 1,069 BCE

Egypt at its most powerful and most expansionist — Thutmose III, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, Ramesses II.

1,650 BCE – 1,550 BCE

Foreign rulers take the delta, bringing the chariot and the composite bow with them.

2,055 BCE – 1,650 BCE

Reunification after collapse, and the classical age of Egyptian literature.

2,600 BCE

Built at Giza in a burst of about a century. They were already two thousand years old when Cleopatra was born.

2,686 BCE – 2,181 BCE

The age of pyramid building and a centralised god-king state. It ends in drought and fragmentation.

3,100 BCE

Upper and Lower Egypt are joined under a single ruler, beginning roughly three thousand years of pharaonic state.

3,200 BCE

Egypt begins writing — one of only a handful of places on Earth where writing was invented rather than borrowed.