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Ancient Egypt

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Archaeoastronomy

Part of the book series: Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics ((ULNP))

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Abstract

Egypt is a unique place: a short strip of fertile terrain, surrounded by desert, and refreshed only by the River Nile. The climate is consequently arid, but the land is fertile due to the nutritious soil brought by the river during its annual flooding. This land attracted an increasing number of people up until the formation of a unified kingdom about 3200 BC (Shaw in The Oxford history of Ancient Egypt, Oxford University Press, Oxford, 2000; Kemp, Ancient Egypt: anatomy of a civilization, Routledge, NY, 2005). The subsequent history of Egypt has traditionally been divided into three “Kingdoms” each distinguished by “dynasties” of rulers; the first period of splendour, the so called Old Kingdom, corresponds to dynasties 3–6, 2630–2152 BC circa (all dates will be given according to the Baines and Malek (1981) chronology).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. School of Civil Architecture, Politecnico di Milano, Milan, Italy

    Giulio Magli

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  1. Giulio Magli
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Correspondence to Giulio Magli .

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Magli, G. (2016). Ancient Egypt. In: Archaeoastronomy. Undergraduate Lecture Notes in Physics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-22882-2_8

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