Talk:Ancient Egypt

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Initial critique of the existing article

Okay, here's a quick critique of some of the issues as I see it with the existing article:

"Weasel words", mainly imprecise wording of factual statements:
- Done"Ancient Egypt was a long-standing civilization": we have a pretty good idea how long that was; why not state it?
- Done"Khafre's Pyramid (4th dynasty) and Great Sphinx of Giza (c.2500 BC or perhaps earlier).": The "c" is for "circa", so "c. 2500 BC" doesn't need the "or perhaps earlier" (which arguably alludes to the fringe theorists saying that it is millennia older.
- Done "Karnak Temple where some of the best preserved ancient Egyptian writing still exists": I find the phrase "best preserved" grating; it is not what Karnak is all about, and on the whole you would probably be better off finding a picture in the Ancient Egypt section on Wikimedia Commons that more accurately illustrates samples of Egyptian hieroglyphs
-Done "Louvre Museum antiquity": it's a picture of a large jar, not an unidentified "antiquity". Again, suggest you find a better image to illustrate the section the pic goes with

Lists where there should be prose:

- The History sections starts off strong, but then becomes a link to a list of pharaohs and dynasties. Better to borrow from the History of ancient Egypt article and from related articles to help flesh this out.
- Similarly, the Literature section is simply a bunch of links to notable works, but this doesn't constitute a useful summary the topic

Sections that are too short:
- The art section deserves more than two meager paragraphs, and the Architecture section ought to be beefed up as well. In both cases I suggest drawing upon more info from the parent articles and summarizing them.

Not enough citations
- I'll make a point of going through the article and adding citation requests to things that are arguably contentious. For an article this size I would expect to see about twice the number of citations than are already provided.
- If you want an article to pass GA status, all of the citations that have not been referenced need to be dealt with. Most of these fall under the "Open Questions" section, and deal with fringe theories. Those should either be chopped or put into its own section labeled "Alternate theories" or something similar.

More comments to come, but that's a start! Cheers! Captmondo 13:17, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

• Also the article needs a few words about the Amarna period. Jeff Dahl 00:19, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

I have seen your reply on my User page asking me to tackle the history section. It's big, but I'll see what I can do. And yes, I agree that it ought to cover the Amarna period as well.

To my eyes one of the largest "holes" is the section having to do with Ancient Egyptian literature. I see that Markh has created a stub "main" article for Ancient Egyptian literature, but this needs to be expanded considerably. Given time, I will lend a hand to that as well. Captmondo 14:08, 29 September 2007 (UTC)

Just fyi, the remainder of the History section will take longer to do, primarily because the source articles are either haphazard, too short or contain a lot of contentious material (primarily relating to modern-day religions, for which I do not have a lot of reference material to draw upon). Will keep working at it, but expect progress to be slower. Cheers! Captmondo 04:20, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I have added brief summaries of what was in the break-out articles for the history sections, and tidied up the references (some were missing a The article is now really long! Is this a problem? 11:40, 6 October 2007 (UTC) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Markh (talk • contribs)

Good work Markh! Though am guessing you are finding that the quantity and quality of readily-available information to draw upon is getting a bit on the thin side. And yes, I agree that this section is getting too long. My thinking was to "start big" and then go through the whole thing again and winnow it down (one exception: possibly expand the section on the early part of the 18th dynasty). At most I'd say each section (save for the New Kingdom, which most people will want to know more about) ought to be no more than 3 paragraphs long each.

Will first work on bringing the ancillary articles up to snuff, and then copy a summary of that info to this article.

Nice to see how the literature section is coming along btw! Captmondo 15:55, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

Having added content into all of the histor sections, I think we should replace the History of Ancient Egypt article (after extracting any information that is missing), with the history section from this article, and then massively reduce the section in this article, as it is now really too big for anyone to read. Markh 20:02, 6 October 2007 (UTC)

I agree with what you propose. Have just finished salvaging what I though was worth keeping content-wise from the History of Ancient Egypt article and placed it into the body of this article. Now you can feel free to copy the whole of the History section from this article and replace the History of Ancient Egypt article with it in good conscience. The comes the work of whittling down the History section here. Captmondo 00:49, 8 October 2007 (UTC)

Do the first half, and replaced the History of Ancient Egypt article with the stuff from here, now we need to reduce the size of this article. Markh 20:56, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

I'll volunteer to work on trimming down the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods and the Predynastic sections. Jeff Dahl 22:14, 9 October 2007 (UTC)

OK, I trimmed down the Paleolithic and Neolithic. Next I'll do Early dynastic and Old Kingdom. Jeff Dahl 04:53, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

And just so we don't forget, we should explain the concept of co-regency, something that I think is totally unique to Egypt. Jeff Dahl 01:40, 10 October 2007 (UTC)

I've gone and whittled down the Third Intermediate Period section somewhat. I'm also not sure how important the concept of coregency really is with an article of this scope/breadth. It already has its own article (which looks like it may need updating from an Ancient Egyptian perspective) and this sort of thing can best be left to individual pharaoh article (IMHO). Captmondo 21:39, 12 October 2007 (UTC)

Comment to 83d40m re: size of article: I noticed your edit comment that you disagree about reducing the size of the article. Just to be clear, the rest of us who are working on the article simply want to trim down the long history section so that it is not overlong. Fine details can and should appear in the associated articles on those periods, which are referenced at the top of each sub-section. If you disagree with this assertion, I respectfully suggest you do so here. (Like the addition to the Ptolemiac period section btw, ditto the nice pic of the statue of Cleopatra from the Hermitage)! Cheers! Captmondo 14:36, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Exactly, the history section was better than the actual History of Ancient Egypt article, and there is no need to repeat content here. The rest of the article needs expansion and then review, as it is an on-going process Markh 18:45, 15 October 2007 (UTC)

Date for the pyramid/sphinx caption

I reworked the caption on the pyramid/sphinx photo. I have mentioned 4th dynasty and Old kingdom, and tossed in a date around 2550 BC. I know the dating error during OK is about ±50 years or so, and 2550 BC is right in the middle of the ranges given in my sources. I'm open to discussion about which dates, if any, to include for the caption, but 2550 seems like a nice round number that is consistent with what I have in my sources. Jeff Dahl 20:55, 27 September 2007 (UTC)

I think that makes the most sense, and since the sources back that up, go with it. Captmondo 12:14, 28 September 2007 (UTC)

Trimming down

I just finished trimming down the Old Kingdom. I'm not concerned about the images, and I don't care what happens to them right now just as long as they don't get in the way. We can fine tune that stuff after the copy editing is done. I'm happy to continue marching through the history section, taking on the first intermediate period and middle kingdom. I'll add page numbers to the refs maybe a little later. So we are now down to just over 100kb from 116kb, at this rate we shouldn't have any trouble getting to a manageable size. Jeff Dahl 21:01, 17 October 2007 (UTC)

Automatic peerreview

The following suggestions were generated by a semi-automatic javascript program, and might not be applicable for the article in question.

• Per Wikipedia:What is a featured article?, Images should have concise captions.^[?]
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• Per WP:WIAFA, this article's table of contents (ToC) may be too long- consider shrinking it down by merging short sections or using a proper system of daughter pages as per Wikipedia:Summary style.^[?]
• There are a few occurrences of weasel words in this article- please observe WP:AWT. Certain phrases should specify exactly who supports, considers, believes, etc., such a view.
  • allege
  • might be weasel words, and should be provided with proper citations (if they already do, or are not weasel terms, please strike this comment).^[?]
• Please make the spelling of English words consistent with either American or British spelling, depending upon the subject of the article. Examples include: honor (A) (British: honour), armor (A) (British: armour), neighbor (A) (British: neighbour), meter (A) (British: metre), fibre (B) (American: fiber), offense (A) (British: offence), organize (A) (British: organise), recognize (A) (British: recognise), ization (A) (British: isation), any more (B) (American: anymore), grey (B) (American: gray), jewelry (A) (British: jewellery), mould (B) (American: mold), molt (A) (British: moult).
• Please ensure that the article has gone through a thorough copyediting so that it exemplifies some of Wikipedia's best work. See also User:Tony1/How to satisfy Criterion 1a.^[?]

You may wish to browse through User:AndyZ/Suggestions for further ideas. Thanks, Markh 12:12, 18 October 2007 (UTC)

Egyptian Life

I believe that someone needs to write more about their burial customs. It was a huge part of Egyptian life...or death, and yet, there doesn't seem to be a lot of info on their mummification or the burying of the body in the pyramid or tomb. It may be that there is enough info on that subject, and I thought there wasn't only because I didn't read the whole article, but even in that case, this whole page needs to be expanded. For fans of Ancient Egypt, such as myself, this page barely covers half of the worthy topics it can have.

Abluescarab 03:37, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

I can understand your concerns and we integrate the burial as you suggest (but we do talk about tomb types under the Architecture heading), but if we expand the article to cover every detail, it will get too long for people to read. This is actually a very important issue, because people reading an article want to get the most bang for the buck: they want to quickly get a summary of the topic. Right now, the article weighs in at about 95kb, which equates to about 20 or more printed pages (depending on how you print them). For most topics, 95kb is quite long, but for a broad topic like ancient Egypt, the length could probably stay at 80 to 90kb without too much problem. Adding little bits here and there can easily bog down the article so that people won't be able to get a good summary of the topic. That said, we have links to sub-articles which explain the topics in much greater detail, for example Egyptian burial rituals and protocol talks about a lot more than we can put in this article. See also WP:Summary. Jeff Dahl (Talk • contribs) 04:32, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

By the way, you mention you didn't read the whole article. Is it because it is so long already? Jeff Dahl (Talk • contribs) 04:32, 5 November 2007 (UTC)

Well, yeah, I guess, but it's not that it's too long, it's that it doesn't hold my interest, which surprises me. I don't know why; I don't understand. Maybe we could have more seperate articles, not a lot, so that it won't annoy people, but maybe the broader topics, we could just have a link to a page (e.g. Ancient Egypt: Burial Customs) —Preceding unsigned comment added by Abluescarab (talk • contribs) 04:54, 7 November 2007 (UTC)

On the History channel they have constructed a face of an Egyptian Pharaoh (I think king Tut). One significant facial feature of the Pharaoh was the back of his head which seems to be longer than the average head in modern humans. I think the greatest majority of the population of modern Egypt is Arabs. Are modern day Arabs direct descendants of ancient Egyptians or were the majority of the ancient population a different race? Are there still any modern tribes or ethnic groups which are closely linked to ancient Egyptians? Daniel 11:14, 16 November 2007 (CAT)

Copyedit

• Hey Jeff, I've copyedited the lead; take a look and see if I've seriously altered the meaning of anything, or if there's anything you don't like. I would also suggest establishing a standard of American spelling conventions (since, I believe, "civilization" is spelled with an "s" in British English). It's not bad at all though, even if it is a bit wordy at parts (it looks like it's going to be a fun ce); just be sure to reference after punctuation, and at the end of the sentence if at all possible. Finally, I would suggest moving the Great Pyramids somewhere else; although iconic, I think one picture--that of your map--would be more professional, clean, and encyclopedic. A thoroughly great job overall!

P. S. That "needs expansion" template halfway done the article should be gone by the time I get there (in one to two weeks), since I can't ce unstable sections. Thanks! --Malachirality (talk) 08:17, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Thanks so much for helping and the nice comments. I'll take care of the tagged section ASAP. As for the pyramids, that's a tough call so I'll defer that decision for later. Again, I appreciate the help! Jeff Dahl (Talk • contribs) 17:31, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

• Questions: please clarify the meaning of "an interpretation of the Narmer Palette, a ceremonial cosmetic palette depicting this ruler wearing pharaonic regalia." Which ruler is depicted? how does this suggest Narmer=Menes?

The Narmer palette shows the pharaoh Narmer uniting upper and lower Egypt, and this is the interpretation part, because the palette does not directly say "Narmer unifies Egypt", instead it uses symbols and iconography that are open to interpretation (which has been pretty much universally accepted). The identification as Menes is because the ancient Egyptian king lists don't mention any Narmer, they say Menes is the founder of the civilization. Often kings had more than one name, so it could be that Meni was just another one of Narmer's names. Jeff Dahl (Talk • contribs) 02:07, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

• "from which they could control trade routes to the levant and the labor and agricultural produce of the fertile delta region." were they trying to control the labor/produce of the region itself, or were they trying to control the trade routes to the labor/produce of the region?

--Malachirality (talk) 22:22, 9 December 2007 (UTC)

Controlling the delta meant the pharaohs could control the trade routes with Byblos and the rest of the near-east, which brought in wood, oil, and luxuries, and pharaohs could profit from this trade. Also, the delta has a huge amount of fertile land, so much of the crops were grown there, and that's where the taxes and manpower were coming from. Since Memphis was located right at the southern edge of the delta along the Nile, the administration was located at a key spot for going south to upper Egypt as well. It is interesting to note that even today the city of Cairo is located in this strategic location. Jeff Dahl (Talk • contribs) 02:07, 10 December 2007 (UTC)

• If you haven't already, I would suggest reviewing the copyedited sections to make sure nothing has been incorrectly altered (esp. wrt the questions asked earlier and here as well). Speaking of which: I have characterized "these practice" (after five centuries of "these practices) as "feudal". If this is inaccurate please change it or notify me here. Finally, I know you weren't too warm to the idea when I mentioned it earlier, but I strongly feel that the Great Pyramids picture would be better placed in this section, esp. wrt the line mentioning "Khufu" and "enduring monuments to the great power of the pharaohs" (not verbatim I know). It would be more enc. appropriate I feel, and a better fit size-wise as well. As it stands, the two picture combo in the lead is awkwardly fitted, looks cluttered, and makes a big chunk of space at the end of the lead/TOC section. But I'll understand if you're hesitant; I don't plan on bring this up again. Cheers --Malachirality (talk) 05:27, 11 December 2007 (UTC)
  • I just made a few minor fixes, I hope this way makes sense. I'm changing over the citations to the Harvard style and adding page numbers as well. As for the pyramids, I'm not the right judge since I'm so used to it, but I can't shake the desire to have a strong iconic image at the top to let readers know they've hit the right page. Jeff Dahl (Talk • contribs) 20:32, 11 December 2007 (UTC)

Third Intermediate Period

1. Pronoun w/out antecedent: "they" were replaced by the Libyans...The High Priests of Amun or the Pharoahs? or both? Need to specify who, when, and/or where.
2. There seems to be a problem with chronology: the article makes it seem that the 24th dynasty was founded after the ruler of the 25th dynasty conquered so-and-so.
3. Last sentence(s): did Egypt or Assyria enjoy the "numerous victories"? If the former, then why the abrupt last sentence, "...Thebes was occupied and Memphis was sacked"?
4. Largely unrelated to ce, but more dates would be helpful in this section.

Thanks --Malachirality (talk) 22:14, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

Ah yes, I understand the confusion over the dynasties. It would be convenient if every dynasty came one after the other in a neat series, but actually there were as many as 4 dynasties ruling at the same time in different areas during the third intermediate period. I'll have a map coming that should clarify, and I will probably remove references to the dynasty numbers. I'll have to get back to the details after the holidays, as all my books are back in Chicago. Thanks again for your help. Jeff Dahl (Talk • contribs) 01:17, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Roman Domination

• "The Byzantine Empire...had little in common with the Western Roman Empire, which fell in the face of Islamic invasions in the fifteenth century"--was it the Byzantine or the Western Roman Empire that fell in the fifteenth century? Common sense indicates the former, but the modifier/comma suggests the latter.
• Also pretty much unrelated to ce, but I've noticed a sudden lack of sources in these later history sections. Not Jewish myself, but I suspect in any case that phrases such as "the Jews' nighttime massacre of many Christians" will need some citations.

--Malachirality (talk) 04:20, 23 December 2007 (UTC)

Copyedit Finished

I think I've finished! Anyways, thanks for cooperating and answering my flood of questions; your participation made this a really fun copyedit (learned a lot too). There are still a few big things to do for this article though (there's some underlinking of important terms/places/things, and of course, sources), so if the prose changes around a lot, I might come back to take a look (or the proofreader will catch it). I'll probably continue to help out a little with wlinking, though I'm no good with sources right now.

Anyway, don't hesitate to drop me a line if you have another article that needs copyediting or if you have a request at LOCE that is just sitting there. And good luck in your future editing! --Malachirality (talk) 18:34, 24 December 2007 (UTC)

Controversies

Should there be a seperate article on controversial subjects from Ancient Egypt, or should this get a section in this article? If a seperate article exists, I cannot find it (please give me the link if it exists).

Some subjects that should be mentioned:

- Attribution of the Great Pyramid to Cheops (Khufu). Only little proof of this exists (a very small number of cartouches), and the proof that does exists is considered to be fraudulous by some Egyptologists. - Presence of cocaine, THC and nicotine in Egyptian mummies from 1000 BC indicates trading with American civilizations. This is not accepted by Egyptologists, but the presence of these substances has been proven beyond any doubt. Since coca and tobacco are indiginous to America, there had to be trades. Cocaine and nicotine did not reach Europa until around 1500 AD. - The Egyptians were able to make nearly perfectly round diorite vases without the wheel having been invented. 1) How did they polish diorite in the first place (one of the hardest stones) 2) How did they get it exactly round without a wheel to rotate it on?

These are just some of the scientific problems (I do have the sources of these claims), but it illustrates the point that a lot of things are just accepted which are not proven. Since it is an encyclopedia, I think these uncertainties should be addressed to prevent people from taking things for true without any second guess.

Wild Wizard (talk) 16:12, 22 December 2007 (UTC)

Which Egyptologists consider the attribution to khufu fraudulent? Attribution of the step pyramid is beyond doubt, and we know the giza pyramids came after the step pyramid. All the kings of the 4th dynasty are accounted for, so who else could the great pyramid belong to? Presence of THC, cocaine etc seem dubious to me, where is this information coming from? How could the pyramids/sphinx come from 10,000 BC? There was no culture in ancient Egypt capable of building the pyramids in 10,000BC but there was in 2500 BC. As for the round vases, this is an easy one. The ancient Egyptians used drills and drill bits to hollow out vases. In fact, there are even 4th dynasty drill cores that show how they drilled holes through hard stones, there is no mystery.

What info to include in the article? We should include core topics that were important parts of the ancient culture. Fringe theories haven't gotten enough reliable sources to support them and even then they don't contribute much to our understanding of the culture. Jeff Dahl (Talk • contribs) 22:38, 22 December 2007 (UTC)