The history of the alphabet started in ancient Egypt.

The Great Sphinx and the pyramids of Giza are among the most recognizable symbols of the civilization of ancient Egypt.

Map of ancient Egypt, showing major cities and sites of the Dynastic period ( c. 3150 BC to 30 BC )

Ancient Egypt was an ancient civilization of Northeastern Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River in what is now the modern country of Egypt.

In ancient Egypt and Mycenae, gold was often alloyed with copper to produce red-gold, or iron to produce a bright burgundy-gold.

His verses have not come down to us through a manuscript tradition-generations of scribes copying an author's collected works, such as delivered intact into the modern age four entire books of Pindar's odes-but haphazardly, in quotes from ancient scholars and commentators whose own works have chanced to survive, and in the tattered remnants of papyri uncovered from an ancient rubbish pile at Oxyrhynchus and other locations in Egypt: sources that modern scholars have studied and correlated exhaustively, adding little by little to the world's store of poetic fragments.

Ancient art was largely, but not entirely, based on the nine great ancient civilizations: Egypt, Mesopotamia, Persia, Greece, China, Rome, India, the Celtic peoples, and Maya.

Its value is the insight it provides to the ancient culture of Egypt.

In Critias, Plato claims that his accounts of ancient Athens and Atlantis stem from a visit to Egypt by the legendary Athenian lawgiver Solon in the 6th century BC.

In Egypt, Solon met a priest of Sais, who translated the history of ancient Athens and Atlantis, recorded on papyri in Egyptian hieroglyphs, into Greek.

Ancient Nubia shared many aspects of its mythology with ancient Egypt and there is debate about the original source of some religious concepts that the two cultures share and, whether the assimilation was from Nubia to Egypt, the reverse, or through continuing exchanges.

At one time the Kush of Nubia ruled ancient Egypt.

* Ay ( reigned c. 1323 – 1319 or 1327 – 1323 BCE ), a pharaoh of ancient Egypt

The jackal was strongly associated with cemeteries in ancient Egypt, since it was a scavenger which threatened to uncover human bodies and eat their flesh.

" Mount " Megiddo is a Tell on which ancient forts were built to guard the main highway, the Via Maris, which connected Ancient Egypt with Mesopotamia.

* Mehen, another ancient board game from Predynastic Egypt

Similar technology may have been used in ancient Ireland ( the Liath Meisicith ) and quite possibly ancient Egypt.

Boats were used between 4000 BCE and 3000 BCE in Sumer, ancient Egypt and in the Indian Ocean.

Brewing has taken place since around the 6th millennium BC, and archaeological evidence suggests that this technique was used in ancient Egypt.

They were deposited with the dead in ancient Egypt.

In ancient Egypt, the bee was seen to symbolize the lands of Lower Egypt, with the Pharaoh being referred to as " He of Sedge and Bee " ( the sedge representing Upper Egypt ).

In ancient Greek mythology, ambrosia () is sometimes the food or drink of the Greek gods ( or demigods ), often depicted as conferring ageless immortality upon whomever consumed it.

The counterpart of Ares among the Roman gods is Mars, who as a father of the Roman people held a more important and dignified place in ancient Roman religion for his agricultural and tutelary functions.

Catullus and Callimachus did not describe the feats of ancient heroes and gods ( except perhaps in re-evaluating and predominantly artistic circumstances, e. g. poems 63 and 64 ), focusing instead on small-scale personal themes.

* The multiple gods of pan-and polytheistic faiths ( as in the ancient Greek and Roman )

In Saxo's Gesta Danorum, however, the gods and goddesses are heavily euhemerized, and Saxo's view on pagan deities is extremely biased, therefore most stories related to pagan gods written in it might not exist in ancient lore.

Indeed, amongst many ancient writers, Moses himself was seen as an Egyptian rather than a Jew, and two manuscripts likely dating to the 4th century, both of which purport to be the legendary eighth Book of Moses ( the first five being the initial books in the Biblical Old Testament ), present him as a polytheist who explained how to conjure gods and subdue demons.

When the gods were believed to be duly propitiated ... Armour, weapons, and other things of the kind were ordered to be in readiness, and the ancient spoils gathered from the enemy were taken down from the temples and colonnades.

Modern scholarship has disproved Margaret Murray's theory, however various horned gods and mother goddesses were indeed worshipped in the British Isles during the ancient and early Medieval periods.

While the ancient Egyptian beliefs usually recognized many gods, worship was often focused primarily upon a supreme deity, and this focus also changed from time to time.

Incestuous unions were frowned upon and considered as nefas ( against the laws of gods and man ) in ancient Rome.

Unlike other ancient Near Eastern gods, the Hebrew God is portrayed as unitary and solitary ; consequently, the Hebrew God's principal relationships are not with other gods, but with the world, and more specifically, with the people He created.

The Jewish Bible ( Tanakh ) records and repeatedly condemns the widespread worship of other gods in ancient Israel.

Julian's personal religion was both pagan and philosophical ; he viewed the traditional myths as allegories, in which the ancient gods were aspects of a philosophical divinity.

In the 19th century, Biblical syncretists associated the sons of Noah with ancient pagan gods.

In some instances, such as Izanagi-no-Mikoto and Izanami-no-Mikoto, kami are personified deities, similar to the gods of ancient Greece or Rome.

The ancient Egyptians credited one of their gods, Thoth, with the invention of music, which Osiris in turn used as part of his effort to civilize the world.

He speculated that myths arose due to the lack of abstract nouns and neuter gender in ancient languages: anthropomorphic figures of speech, necessary in such languages, were eventually taken literally, leading to the idea that natural phenomena were conscious beings, gods.

The Mesopotamians believed their kings and queens were descended from the City of Gods, but, unlike the ancient Egyptians, they never believed their kings were real gods.

The ' gods ' of most polytheistic pantheons are actually powerful, immortal human-like races from other dimensions who visited Earth in ancient times, and became the basis of many legends.

" A practicing Wiccan herself, Adler used her own conversion to paganism as a case study, remarking that as a child she had taken a great interest in the gods and goddesses of ancient Greece, and had performed her own devised rituals in dedication to them.

In many ancient legal systems ( e. g. early Roman law ), religious sites ( e. g. temples ) were considered property of the God or gods they were devoted to.

* Pantheon, Rome, now a Catholic church, once a temple to the gods of ancient Rome

The ancient gods with tails of animals who stood for primitive bodily insticts, were considered to protect the flocks and herds, and some of them survived in the cult of Dionysos ( Satyrs and Seilinoi ) and Pan ( the goat-god ).