The land of the Nile, sphinxes, hieroglyphs, pyramids, and famously cursed archaeologists exhuming mummies from painted and gilded sarcophagi, ancient Egypt fuels the imagination. Spanning thousands, yes, literally, thousands of years, Egypt was a durable society with rulers viewed as the intermediary between the gods and mere mortals. When one of these pharaohs, Amenhotep IV (Akhenaten), devoted himself solely to only one god, Aten, he stirred things up but also launched the period of the Amarna pharaohs whose most famous representative is King Tut and whose most beautiful queen was Nefertiti. When Alexander the Great died, his successors built a city in Egypt named Alexandria that became the lasting cultural center of the ancient Mediterranean world.

Here are photographs and artworks giving a glimpse of ancient Egypt.

Isis was the great Egyptian goddess, wife of Osiris, mother of Horus, sister of Osiris, Set, and Nephthys, and daughter of Geb and Nut, who was worshiped all over Egypt and elsewhere. She searched for her husbands body, retrieved and reassembled Osiris, taking on the role of goddess of the dead.

The name of Isis may mean throne. She sometimes wears cow horns and a sun disk.

The Oxford Classical Dictionary says she is: equated with the snake goddess Renenutet, the goddess of the harvest, she is ‘mistress of life’; as magician and protector, as in the Graeco-Egyptian magical papyri, she is ‘mistress of heaven’....

Two daughters of Akhenaten were Neferneferuaten Tasherit, possibly born in his regnal year 8 and Neferneferure, in year 9. They were both daughters of Nefertiti. The younger daughter died young and the older may have served as pharaoh, dying before Tutankhamen took over. Nefertiti disappeared suddenly and mysteriously and what happened in the succession of the pharaoh is likewise unclear.

The Great Pyramid of Khufu (or Cheops as the pharaoh was called by the Greeks) was built at Giza around 2560 B.C, taking about twenty years to complete. It was to serve as the final resting place