Editing Bronze Age (section)

===Egypt===
Ancient Egypt is probably the most famous archetypal Bronze Age civilization. Modern Egyptology started with [[Industrial Revolution|Napoleon]], who took an interest in the pyramids such and hired artists, reporters and scholars to study the ruins (most notably finding the Rosetta Stone that let them decode their written language) and report back to France and has been going strong ever since. It helps that Egypt is a very desiccated place and we have a lot of records buried in the sand.

Like Mesopotamia, Egypt is based around a river which ran through a desert. Unlike Mesopotamia, the River was easy to work with. Between May and August the Nile would flood. Once it receded, the flood plain was both wet and fertile from freshly deposited sediment. In practical terms this meant that Egyptian Agriculture was on easy mode. High yields with little work and during inundation people had a lot of free time on their hands, which they often spent building Pyramids.  There was little point for Egypt in making war; all the surrounding lands were barren desert, and most of their neighbors depended on trade with Egypt for food anyway.  This meant the Pharaohs could easily afford enough men, horses, and chariots to keep anyone else from getting ideas (at least until the Greeks and Romans showed up).

A really outstanding fact about Egypt is that it was remarkably stable. From roughly 3150 BCE to 525 BCE Egypt existed as a political entity without much internal societal upheaval. There were periods of disruption and instability, but they were always fairly brief with people returning to the status quo with Pharaohs, priesthoods, nomearchs and so forth. Similarly there was a lot of continuity of culture. A few new technologies were introduced (Bronzeworking and chariots) but the overall impact on people's day to day lives was highly limited. It's easy to identify what dynasty an Imperial Chinese porcelain plate was made in based on it's style or what century a picture of a medieval knight was made in based on his armor. In contrast you would be hard pressed to find the stylistic difference between an Egyptian statue of a Pharaoh from 2600 BCE and one from 26 BCE of Caesar. Hell, Augustus's Pharaonic statues from around 10 CE look barely different from Narmer's palettes from around 3000 BCE.