Duration: 35 Minutes
Suitable for children starting from 6 years old and above
From far out in space, its dark winding outline can be seen against the golden deserts of northern Africa.
From its sources in the heartland of Central Africa, the rift valley lakes, it flows northward thousands of miles forming a large fertile delta on the Mediterranean.
It’s the world’s longest river—the Nile.
Here, a great civilization arose; its monuments are as awe-inspiring today as when they were new… A magnificent legacy of massive buildings covered in pictures and writing… Buildings we can read today the way we read a book.
On the West bank of the Nile, the Cities of the dead and on the East the temples of the living gods… Structures that have lasted for thousands of years, enduring as the stars, while millions of homes and even the palaces of the pharaohs returned to the river mud from which they were built.
So overwhelming are they, and so accurate are their alignments that some people claim that they were observatories, possessed magical powers or were even built by aliens.
How much truth is there in these claims? How did the Egyptians see and use the stars, and what is their legacy to us?
The ancient Egyptians gave us the 24-hour day and the 365-day year, but they did not try like the ancient Greeks to explain in scientific terms how the sun, the planets and the stars moved, or even where they were.
For them, the heavens were the realm of the gods. The sky embodied the balance between order and chaos, between death and rebirth. The god kings lived on Earth and then journeyed to the heavens to reign forever with the imperishable stars.
To us, the stars are no longer a place of religious mystery. They are instead the doorway into a magnificent universe that is much more wondrous than the Egyptians could ever have imagined… a universe whose secrets we have only now begun to understand.
The Pharaohs imagined that they could travel to the stars. Now five thousand years later, we’ve embarked on the first steps of a journey which may make that dream come true.