Ancient Egyptian Technology and Inventions

In antiquity, ancient civilizations arose around the Nile River in Egypt, the Tigris and Euphrates Rivers in Mesopotamia, the Indus River in India, and the Yellow River in China.

While later civilizations, such as the Greeks, could learn from them, these ancient civilizations had to invent everything for themselves.

The ancient Egyptians would come to invent mathematics, geometry, surveying, metallurgy, astronomy, accounting, writing, paper, medicine, the ramp, the lever, the plow, and mills for grinding grain.

Metal Making 

Around 3000 BC, the Egyptians discovered that by mixing a small amount of tin ore with copper ore, they could make bronze.

Bronze is harder and more durable than other metals of that time, and this archeological period became known as the Bronze Age. Bronze tools, weapons, armor, building materials, and decorative items have been found.

Writing 

The ancient Egyptians were among the first groups of people to write and keep records. The earliest form of Egyptian writing was hieroglyphics, which combined logographic, syllabic, and alphabetic elements and had some 1,000 distinct characters.

Later, hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts were derived from hieroglyphics, as were the Greek and Aramaic scripts. This makes Egyptian hieroglyphics the ancestor of most scripts in use today.

Papyrus 

The ancient Egyptians turned the pith of the Cyperus papyrus plant, which is found throughout the Mediterranean region, into sheets that could be rolled into scrolls.

The earliest evidence of papyrus was unearthed in 2012 at Wadi al-Jarf, an ancient Egyptian harbor on the Red Sea coast, and dates to 2560 – 2550 BC. The papyrus rolls found there describe the last years of building the Great Pyramid of Giza.

The only known ancient Egyptian library to survive to this day is the Tebtunis Temple Library, which is housed at the University of California, Berkeley, and contains the famous crocodile mummy texts.

These forty-five private documents date from the first half of the 1st century BC and were found in five crocodile mummies buried next to each other.

Ink 

Having papyrus to write on would have been useless without the invention of ink. The ancient Egyptians mixed vegetable gum, soot, and bee wax to make black ink. Eventually, they replaced the soot with other materials, such as red ochre, to create various ink colors.

The Ox-drawn plow and the Sickle 

The first ox-drawn plows appeared in Egypt as early as 2500 B.C. They were made of bronze, which easily scored the earth into furrows. Workers with hoes then broke up the clumps of soil and sowed the rows with seed. Along the fertile banks of the Nile River, the ancient Egyptians grew wheat and various vegetables.

The sickle, with its curved blade, was used for cutting and harvesting grains, such as wheat and barley.

Canals and Irrigation Channels 

The Egyptians pioneered using canals and irrigation channels to direct water from the Nile River to farm fields that were distant from the river. They built gates into the canals to control the flow of water, and they built reservoirs to hold water supplies in case of drought.

The ancient Egyptians used water wheels, which worked as an invention called a shadoof. It comprised a long pole with a bucket on one end and a weight on the other.

The buckets were dropped into the Nile, filled with water, and raised using water wheels. Then, oxen swung the pole so that the water could be emptied into canals used to irrigate the crops.

The Calendar 

The Egyptians devised their highly accurate solar calendar by recording the yearly reappearance of Sirius (the Dog Star) star in the eastern sky. When Sirius rose, it coincided with the yearly flooding of the Nile River.

The Egyptian calendar contained 365 days, divided into 12 months. Each month had 30 days, and there were five festival days at the end of each year.

However, earth's solar year is 365.25 days long, which today we account for with Leap Year. Gradually, the Egyptian calendar became incorrect, but this problem was solved by Ptolemy III, whose Ptolemaic Calendar added one day to the 365 days every four years.

Clocks 

The Egyptians used their famous obelisks as sundials by observing how shadows cast by the obelisk moved around them during determinedthe day. From this, the ancient Egyptians were able to determine the longest and shortest days of the year.

An inscription dating to the 16th century BC and found in the tomb of a court official named Amenemhet shows a water clock. This clock was made from a stone vessel that had a tiny hole in its bottom.

Water dripped through this hole constantly, and the passage of hours could be determined from marks placed on a vessel collecting the water. Priests at the Temple of Karnak used a water clock at night to determine the time to perform various religious rites.

The corbeled Arch 

A corbeled arch is a construction method that uses corbeling to span a space or a void in a structure. Corbelling involves offsetting successive rows of stone or brick so that they project towards the archway's center, eventually meeting at the apex of the archway.

Corbeled arches weren't as efficient as "true" arches, which better support a structure's tensile stresses by compression.

Glass Making 

By circa 1500 BC, Egyptian artisans were making multi-colored glass ingots and vessels. Glass makers shaped the body of a vessel around the core of a ceramic-like material by winding hot-colored glass filaments around the core.

They then added handles and a rim, let the vessel cool, and removed the core. Most early core-formed vessels were small flasks for holding perfumed oil, so they were the world's first perfume bottles.

Furniture 

When you look at pictures of the opening of King Tutankhamun's tomb by Howard Carter in 1923, you see the ancient king was buried with lots of furniture. The ancient Egyptians built beds, tables, and stools.

While early forms of tables were used to store items above the ground, later designs were used for eating off of and playing games. Senet, one of the oldest known board games, was mentioned in an ancient Egyptian hieroglyph dating from 3100 BC.

Surgical Instruments 

The Edwin Smith Papyrus, dating to 1600 BC, is the oldest surgical treatise. It describes 48 surgical cases of injuries, fractures, wounds, dislocations, and tumors and details the type of injury, examination of the patient, diagnosis, prognosis, and treatment. Injuries were to the head, neck, shoulders, breasts, and chest.

The papyrus includes a list of the instruments used during those surgeries, instructions for suturing wounds, and descriptions of using swabs, bandages, adhesive plasters, and cauterizing.

Written in black ink, with explanations written in red ink, the papyrus even contains a section on gynecology and one on cosmetics, along with five prescriptions. The Cairo Museum contains a collection of surgical instruments, including scalpels, scissors, copper needles, forceps, spoons, lancets, hooks, probes, and pincers.

Toothpaste 

The ancient Egyptians invented toothpaste, with one recipe containing powdered ox hooves, ashes, burnt eggshells, and pumice. Another, probably better-tasting recipe, contained rock salt, mint, dried iris flower, and grains of pepper.

This latter recipe came with an "advertisement" that promised a "powder for white and perfect teeth." This could have come out of any 21st Century advertisement.