Ancient Egypt Facts for Kids

Can you imagine holding a world record for that long? The Great Pyramid of Giza, built for Pharaoh Khufu, stood at an original height of 481 feet (146.7 meters)!

That’s taller than almost any building for over four millennia—until people in the modern world finally built something higher!

It was originally covered in smooth, white limestone casing stones that would have made it shine incredibly brightly in the desert sun.

When you think of gods, maybe you think of a few—but Ancient Egypt had a whole stadium full of them! Scholars know the names of more than 1,500 deities in their pantheon.

That’s more gods than there are kids in a giant school district! They had gods for the sun (Ra), the dead (Osiris), and even goddesses for magic (Isis).

Each god had a specific job, from making the Nile flood perfectly to helping scribes write straight.

When they found King Tut's treasure, the most famous thing was his death mask—it’s made of two layers of solid gold!

This amazing mask weighs over 10 kilograms (22 pounds). That's heavier than most Great Danes or Saint Bernard dogs!

They made it so heavy and precious because they believed the gold represented eternal, never-decaying life for the young pharaoh in the afterlife.

The history of Ancient Egypt, from unification until it became part of the Roman Empire, lasted for over 3,000 years!

To put that in perspective, Ancient Rome—which we think of as super old—only lasted about 1,000 years. You could have watched over 300 generations of Egyptians come and go!

This long time period includes the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms, all separated by times of chaos called 'Intermediate Periods'.

Building the Great Pyramid wasn't a weekend project; historians estimate it took about 20 years for Pharaoh Khufu’s workers to finish it!

They used an estimated 2.3 million stone blocks for the core structure alone. That means the builders had to set up almost 320 massive blocks every single day!

That’s the ultimate construction challenge for any kid who’s ever tried to stack too many blocks!

Our alphabet has about 26 letters, but the ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic script used over 700 different picture-symbols for writing!

They weren't just an alphabet, though. Some symbols stood for whole words, and others stood for sounds—like our letters—but they often skipped vowels like 'a' or 'e'!

This made writing a really tricky, specialized skill, usually done by highly trained scribes.

Cleopatra VII, the super famous queen, was actually part of the Ptolemaic dynasty, which was started by one of Alexander the Great’s generals. She was Greek (Macedonian)!

She was the first ruler in her family line to actually learn the Egyptian language, which is pretty amazing when you think about it.

She reigned until about 30 BC, making her the very last pharaoh before Rome took over Egypt forever!

Everyone knows the three big ones at Giza, but guess what? Archaeologists have found at least 118 confirmed pyramids across Egypt!

They were built over a huge time span, starting as early as around 2700 BC.

They weren't all giant like Khufu's—some were smaller and built for queens or nobles!

The Egyptians believed the pharaoh needed a boat to travel the sky with the sun god Ra in the afterlife, so they buried real boats with them!

Near the Great Pyramid, they found an entire, disassembled 144-foot long ship from King Khufu's time, carefully hidden in a pit.

Imagine needing your whole sailboat to sail on to your next adventure—that's Egyptian belief for you!

Artificial mummification, with all the oils and wrappings, became super popular later, around 2700 BC during the Old Kingdom.

Before that, people were sometimes naturally mummified just by being buried in the hot, super-dry sand, which sucked the moisture right out of the body!

It took thousands of years for them to perfect the process of removing organs and using special salts like natron!