Читать книгу World History For Dummies - Peter Haugen - Страница 68

Measuring and math came in handy for building Egypt’s pyramids, which are mind-boggling feats of engineering. Herodotus the Greek, a historian of more than 2,400 years ago, wrote that 100,000 men worked for 20 years on Egypt’s Great Pyramid at Giza. That may be an exaggeration, though, because the Great Pyramid was already more than 2,000 years old when Herodotus wrote about it.

Building pyramids and keeping calendars would be almost impossible without a way to note things. As the Sumerians had a little earlier, the Egyptians developed their own way of recording information in the form of pictures (called pictographic writing), which evolved into a kind of writing called hieroglyphics (medu netcher or “words of the gods” in ancient Egyptian). Then came written stories, recorded history, love poems, and (with a few steps in between) email spam.

An important way for the Egyptians to impose order on their world, hieroglyphics also became the key for much later people to find out about the Egyptians. I tell you about the Rosetta Stone, the modern world’s key to deciphering hieroglyphics, in Chapter 24.