[chris.stone]

Did the Pharaohs have some kind of hidden knowledge or education which allowed them to act as God-like humans? How were the Egyptians so easily fooled? Perhaps the Pharaohs had some knowledge of agriculture or some other type of education which no others had which made them seem more intelligent?

Also, how did Pharaohs come to power? Was it mostly just family inheritance, or did one Pharaoh have to kill another one to gain power? Or was there a political structure in place where Pharaohs rose to power?

[Jason Jewell]

Chris, the pharaoh, backed by the priests, did have some tricks up his sleeve. Some Egyptian temples had sophisticated ways of measuring the water levels in the Nile and could “predict” the annual floods before anyone else noticed the changes in the levels. Priests typically were the only people who were literate.

Of course, none of this means that the pharaoh and priests did not actually believe what they were doing was real.

Succession within dynasties was through family inheritance (often matrilineal, which is why pharaohs often married their sisters). A transition between dynasties sometimes involved violent conflict where one family overthrew another. This was not the norm; Egypt had stable political succession for the most part.

[chris.stone]

This gives new meaning to the phrase “Knowledge is power”.

I guess the priests were there to pass knowledge from one generation to the next and they eventually invented writing.

I don’t like the idea of requiring writing to be needed for the definition of a civilization since it seems clear that Egypt had a civilization long before the advent of writing.

I’m just surprised it took them so long to figure out a way to write down knowledge. Perhaps writing existed much further back in antiquity, but it was a closely guarded secret and not much evidence exists today of writing before 3000BC or so.

[Author]

Posts