The pyramids of Giza are among the most recognizable symbols of the civilization of ancient Egypt.

Ancient Egypt was a civilization of ancient North Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in the place that is now the country Egypt. Ancient Egyptian civilization followed prehistoric Egypt and coalesced around 3100 BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology) with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under Menes (often identified with Narmer). The history of ancient Egypt occurred as a series of stable kingdoms, separated by periods of relative instability known as Intermediate Periods: the Old Kingdom of the Early Bronze Age, the Middle Kingdom of the Middle Bronze Age and the New Kingdom of the Late Bronze Age.

Quotes

• Egypt! from whose all dateless tombs arose
  Forgotten Pharaohs from their long repose,
  And shook within their pyramids to hear
  A new Cambyses thundering in their ear;
  While the dark shades of forty ages stood
  Like startled giants by Nile's famous flood.
  • Lord Byron, The Age of Bronze (1823), V; reported in Hoyt's New Cyclopedia Of Practical Quotations (1922), p. 218.

• What curled and scented sun-girls, almond-eyed,
    With lotos-blossoms in their hands and hair,
    Have made their swarthy lovers call them fair,
  With these spent strings, when brutes were deified,
  And Memnon in the sunrise sprang and cried,
    And love-winds smote Bubastis, and the bare
    Black breasts of carven Pasht received the prayer
    Of suppliants bearing gifts from far and wide!
  This lute has out-sung Egypt; all the lives
    Of violent passion, and the vast calm art
      That lasts in granite only, all lie dead;
  This little bird of song alone survives,
    As fresh as when its fluting smote the heart
      Last time the brown slave wore it garlanded.
  • Edmund Gosse, "On a Lute Found in a Sarcophagus"

• Alauddin had shed more innocent blood than any Pharaoh was guilty of.
  • Z. Barani writing about Alauddin Khalji, quoted from K.S. Lal, Indian Muslims: Who Are They (1990)

• We are good fighters but lousy builders. Our last piece of original architecture was during ancient Egypt. What are we known for now?
  • Michael Matogo, The Burden of a Great Legacy (4 October 2001).

External links

• Encyclopedic article on Ancient Egypt on Wikipedia