Apa yg dihasilkan budaya MESIR kuno ?****

Budaya2 PRA-Islam, apa, siapa dan betulkah jahiliyah ? Bgm pengaruh budaya2 purba itu pada Islam ?
Post Reply
ali5196
Posts: 16757
Joined: Wed Sep 14, 2005 5:15 pm

Apa yg dihasilkan budaya MESIR kuno ?****

Post by ali5196 »

http://www.open2.net/whattheancients/egyptians.html

Image
Egypt became a unified country five thousand years ago and - until the arrival of Alexander the Great in 332 BC - remained a fiercely independent land with its own very distinctive art, religion and culture. Egypt was the superpower of its day and her kings were treated as demigods throughout the Mediterranean world – but what did they do for us?

It goes without saying they gave us mummies and mummification, and one of the great wonders of the ancient world – the pyramids. On a more practical level they invented the sewn plank boat, a method of boat construction using wooden pegs and fibre rope - no nails. Huge boats were built using this technique, the most famous one belonging to King Khufu, the builder of the great pyramid in 2500 BC. The recent discovery of a Bronze Age boat in Britain reveals that this method of construction had found its way here and could have influenced our own boat builders.

Trying to control the flood water of the Nile, the Egyptians built the first dam, a huge undertaking which unfortunately didn't survive a severe flash flood.

Technology and tool-making are high up on the list of Egyptian inventiveness. To speed up the smelting of bronze they invented the foot bellows and devised the multiple headed drill – a drill that could cut through at least three beads at the same time.

As a spin-off from their bead and jewellery making, the Egyptians came up with faience, an attractive glazing material made from quartzite; they quickly put it to use for pottery and tile making. The Egyptians adored decoration and although they didn't invent glass-making they developed the technique to produce highly colourful glass objects; these were highly prized by the wealthy.

With royalty in mind they gave us the wig, make-up and wonderful clothing, and to keep all this safe they came up with the first lock. To pass the time of day they invented fishing as a hobby and the folding stool to sit on whilst waiting for that bite.

And last but not least the Egyptians liked to keep meticulous records and invented paper from the papyrus plant. It's a wonderful material with long fibres and can also be used for basketry, sandals and rope.

Image
Last edited by ali5196 on Tue Dec 11, 2007 6:47 am, edited 1 time in total.
ali5196
Posts: 16757
Joined: Wed Sep 14, 2005 5:15 pm

Post by ali5196 »

http://www.open2.net/historyandthearts/ ... maths.html

Image

For many centuries the indecipherability of Egyptian hieroglyphs helped to perpetuate the Greek belief in Egypt as the source of higher knowledge and wisdom, in mathematics as well as other matters. However, with the decipherment of the trilingual Rosetta Stone (hieroglyphic, demotic and Greek) by Jean Champollion in the 1820s, the picture changed to reveal a civilisation much more pragmatic and down to earth. Although the pyramids and other monumental constructions provide us with substantial evidence that the Egyptians had a good knowledge of mechanics and astronomy, when it comes to mathematics the story is rather different. Despite the fact that the classical Greeks believed mathematics to have been invented in Egypt, there is disappointingly little evidence of the Egyptians’ mathematical attainments. This is because most Egyptian documents were written on papyrus which is extremely fragile and deteriorates over time. Of the few papyri that survive only a tiny number (about a dozen) are concerned with mathematical calculation, of which the earliest dates from 1850 BCE and the most recent from 750 AD.

It is generally agreed that these mathematical texts were used to teach apprentice scribes basic numerical accounting and other techniques that they would need in their later professional life. They are written in a script called hieratic, a semi-cursive derivative of hieroglyphs. (Hieratic came into use for writing on papyri from about 2000 BCE, although hieroglyphic was retained for monumental stone-carving and more formal inscriptions.) Most of our knowledge of Egyptian mathematics is derived from two papyri, the Rhind papyrus (1650 BCE), the largest and the best preserved, and the Moscow papyrus (1850 BCE). The other mathematical papyri are mostly fragmentary in nature.

The Rhind papyrus, which (according to its scribe) is a copy of a text from 200 years earlier, was allegedly discovered in the ruins of a small building close to the temple of Ramesses II at Thebes. It is named after the man who bought it while on holiday in Luxor in 1858 and is now in the British Museum. It is approximately 18 feet long and 13 inches high, and contains extensive lists of divisions on one side and 87 mathematical problems on the other. The Moscow papyrus, now in the Pushkin Museum of Fine Arts, Moscow, is 15 feet long but only about 3 inches high. It contains 25 mathematical problems.

There are also a few Eygptian mathematical texts not on papyrus, the most significant of which are the Leather Roll (1650 BCE), which was so brittle that it remained unopened for 60 years, and the Two Thebes Wooden Tablets (2000 BCE). The Leather Roll contains an addition table, in duplicate, and is now in the British Museum, whilst the Thebes Wooden Tablets contain calculations relating measures of capacity and are now in the Cairo Museum.

The texts can be divided into two different types—problem texts and table texts. The problem texts pose mathematical problems and give their solution in the form of a step-by-step procedure, with each step representing a single mathematical command such as ‘add’ or ‘multiply’. These texts use plain language, not symbolism (apart from actual numbers themselves, of course) and the problems always involve particular numbers, not general formulae. The table texts are tables of numbers that are used in solving mathematical problems, e.g. tables of addition, tables used in fraction reckoning, and tables for conversions of measures.

The Egyptian number system is not too difficult to follow since integers were written according to a decimal system, with different symbols being used to represent the powers of ten: 1, 10, 100, … up to 1,000,000. In hieroglyphic notation these symbols were written additively with each symbol being repeated as often as necessary, eg the number 472 was expressed by writing the symbol for 100 four times, the symbol for 10 seven times, and the symbol for 1 twice. In hieratic, each number from 1 to 9 had a specific symbol, as did each multiple of 10, each multiple of 100, and so on. Thus in hieratic a given number, such as 472 was expressed by putting the symbol for two next to that for seventy and putting both of these symbols next to the symbol for four hundred. Although a zero is not necessary in such a system, the Egyptians did have a symbol for zero but it only occurs in papyri dealing with architecture and accounting.

Egyptian calculations were fundamentally additive. The most frequent operations were doubling and halving. Multiplication is reduced to repeated additions, and division, because it is the inverse of multiplication, is seen in terms of what one number must be multiplied by in order to get another, e.g. a problem such a 100 divided by 13 would be given as multiply 13 so as to get 100.

The most remarkable feature of Egyptian mathematics is its use of fractions. All fractions, with the lone exception of 2/3, are reduced to sums of what we call unit fractions, that is fractions with numerator 1, eg 1/2, 1/7, 1/34. Like integers, unit fractions are written additively, so that:
ali5196
Posts: 16757
Joined: Wed Sep 14, 2005 5:15 pm

Post by ali5196 »

http://www.historylink101.net/egypt_1/a ... _egypt.htm

Image
Women of Ancient Egypt had many more rights than most women of other cultures during the same time period. Egyptian women were considered full citizens and could own their own property. After getting married, a woman did not give up property rights to her husband. A divorced woman could claim part of her former husband’s wealth to support herself and her children. When a man went to war, the wife ran the family business in his absence. Women typically had full charge of the home.

Although women in Egypt enjoyed some rights, they were also limited. Most women in Ancient Egypt were not educated to read or write. This severely limited the types of careers in which women could participate.
ali5196
Posts: 16757
Joined: Wed Sep 14, 2005 5:15 pm

Post by ali5196 »

http://www.historylink101.net/egypt_1/a-marriage.htm
Image

Marriage in Ancient Egypt

Family was very important to Ancient Egyptians. Many love poems have been found that are very similar to a modern idea of love. Marriages for the commoner were not arranged. A man made his intentions known by taking gifts to the girl’s home, and then marriage arrangements followed. The average age for a girl to marry was thirteen.

An agreement was drawn up at the start of a marriage, assigning a portion of the man's wealth to the wife and any children to provide for them should a divorce occur at a later time. The woman also brought items into the marriage, but they remained her property to be passed on her children. In addition, the wife and children were protected by a law that forbade transfer of a valuable object to another person without the wife’s and the eldest son’s consent.

The literature of the day, known as “wisdom literature,” encouraged the man to treat his wife well. Egyptian marriages were monogamous, meaning the custom of being married to just one person at a time. A divorce was basically easy to attain, but it was costly. If a woman committed adultery, it was considered grounds for a divorce and could also bring a punishment of burning or stoning. . It is unclear if the same punishments were applied to men.

For people of nobility and royalty, a different set of marriage customs applied. Multiple wives were common. A pharaoh was married to a queen with a distinct title of the “Great Royal Wife.” He was also married to several minor wives that were quite often arranged for political reasons. The male heir to the throne was often married to the oldest daughter (often his sister or stepsister) of the Great Royal Wife. The Egyptians believed that a male heir was the result of a major god mating with the “Great Royal Wife.” Ths idea led to the belief that the pharaoh was a descendent of the gods.
ali5196
Posts: 16757
Joined: Wed Sep 14, 2005 5:15 pm

Post by ali5196 »

http://www.globalpolitician.com/article ... 12&sid=113

Saladin or Salah al-Din, the twelfth century general loved by Muslims for his victories against the Crusaders, is renowned even in Western history for his supposedly tolerant nature. Very few seem to remember that his son Al-Aziz Uthman, the second sultan of the Ayyubid Dynasty founded by Saladin and presumably influenced by his father's religious convictions, actually tried to demolish the Great Pyramids of Giza only three years after his father's death in 1193. The reason why we can still visit them today is because the task at hand was so big that he eventually gave up the attempt. He did, however, manage to inflict significant damage to Menkaure's Pyramid, the smallest of the Great Pyramids, which contains scars clearly visible to this day. It is tempting to view this as a continuation of his father's Jihad against non-Muslims:

"When king Al-Aziz Othman, son of [Saladdin] succeeded his father, he let himself be persuaded by some people from his Court, who were devoid of good sense, to demolish the pyramids. One started with the red pyramid, which is the third of the great pyramids, and the smallest. (...) They brought there a large number of workmen from all around, and supported them at great cost. They stayed there for eight whole months (...) This happened in the year 593 [ i.e. 1196 AD)."

Such vandalism has been a recurring feature of Islamic nations throughout the ages. Guarding the pyramids at the Giza Plateau is the Great Sphinx. However, sphinxes in ancient times usually appeared in pairs, and there are indications in both classical and medieval sources that the Sphinx used to have a twin. According to archaeologist Michael Poe, there was another sphinx facing the famous one on the other side of the Nile, but it was damaged during a Nile flood, and then completely dismantled by Muslims using it as a quarry for their villages.

Image
The Sphinx and its missing nose

The legend that the missing nose of the Great Sphinx was removed by
Napoléon Bonaparte's artillery during the French expedition to Egypt
1798-1801 is not only factually incorrect, it's ludicrous to anyone with even the most rudimentary knowledge of history. Sketches indicate that the nose was gone long before this. The Egyptian fifteenth century historian al-Maqrizi attributes the act to Muhammad Sa'im al-Dahr, a Sufi Muslim. According to al-Maqrizi, in the fourteenth century, upon discovering that local peasants made offerings to the Sphinx to bless their harvest, al-Dahr became furious at their idolatry and decided to destroy the statue, managing only to break off its nose. It is hard to confirm whether this story is accurate, but if it is, it demonstrates that Sufis are not always the soft and tolerant Muslims they are made out to be.

Far from damaging the Sphinx, the French expedition brought large numbers of scientists to Egypt to catalog the ancient monuments, thus founding modern Egyptology. The trilingual Rosetta Stone, discovered by the French in 1799, was employed by philologist Jean-François Champollion to decipher the Egyptian hieroglyphs in 1822. In this task, Champollion made extensive use of the Coptic language, which in modern times survives only as the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church. Coptic is a direct descendant of the language spoken in ancient Egypt, and might have been understood by pharaohs such as Tutankhamun or Ramses II, although they would no doubt have considered it a rather strange and difficult dialect.

Arab Muslims had controlled Egypt for more than a thousand years, yet never managed to decipher the hieroglyphs nor for the most part displayed much interest in doing so. Westerners did so in a single generation after they reappeared in force in Egypt. So much for "Arab science." And they did so with the help of the language of the Copts, the Egyptian Christians, the only remnant of ancient Egypt that the Arab invaders hadn't managed to completely eradicate.
Post Reply