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Articles on Ancient Egypt

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Hausa is the most widely known Chadic language, spoken by some 80 million people or more. It’s harder to grasp the history of other, unwritten Chadic languages. Irene Becker/Contributor/Getty Images

How I reconstructed an unwritten ancient African language

Reconstructed vocabulary sheds light on cultural items and people’s habitats, including the spread of ideas and the importance of certain concepts.
A depiction of a man milking a cow found on one of the walls of ancient burial tombs south of present-day Cairo dating from 2340 BC. Photo by DeAgostini/Getty Images

Environmental change may have played a role at the dawn of Egyptian history – here’s how

Natural landscape changes in the Nile Delta may have not only stimulated local take up of farming technologies, but might also have played a role in the emergence of the first “nation state”.
A scene from the Books of the Dead (based at the Egyptian Museum) shows the ibis-headed god Thoth recording the result of “the final judgement”. Wasef et al./PLOS ONE

Holy bin chickens: ancient Egyptians tamed wild ibis for sacrifice

An estimated 1.75 million ibises were deposited at a single location in ancient Egypt. But the birds disappeared entirely from the region around 1850, and no one knows why.

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