Ancient Egypt Facts

When the ancient Egyptians defeated Libya around 1208 BC, Pharaoh Merneptah's soldiers collected 6,359 penises from slain Libyan warriors as battle trophies, meticulously recorded on the Great Karnak Inscription.

The Ramses brand condom is named after the great pharaoh Ramses II who fathered over 160 children.

In ancient Egypt, life expectancy at birth was around 30 years—but this statistic is misleading. High infant and childhood mortality rates dragged down the average. Egyptians who survived to adulthood commonly lived into their 50s, 60s, or even 70s.

Honey never spoils. Archaeologists have found 3,000-year-old honey in Egyptian tombs that was still perfectly edible.

Abu Simbel's colossal temples were carved by Ramesses II 3,200 years ago. When Egypt's Aswan Dam threatened to flood them, Egypt and 48 nations raised $40 million. Engineers sliced the temples into 1,000+ blocks - some weighing 30 tons - then rebuilt everything 65 meters higher. The solar alignment still works.

Thutmose II's lost tomb was found near Luxor in 2025. It was the first king's tomb found in the Theban hills since King Tutankhamun's - over 100 years earlier. Ancient floods damaged it and priests removed most of its contents. But fragments of the blue ceiling with its yellow stars survived 3,500 years. Those stars are only found in kings' tombs.

King Tut's complete tomb collection is on display all together for the first time. Howard Carter found all 5,398 pieces in 1922. For a century, most sat in storage - Cairo's old museum showed only about a third. Egypt's Grand Egyptian Museum, beside the Giza pyramids, opened in November 2025 with all of it under one roof. A century after being found, it's all together at last.

The Library of Alexandria held up to 700,000 scrolls. To fill it, guards searched every ship in the harbor, seized any books on board, and kept the originals. It wasn't destroyed in one fire - it died over 500 years. Less than 1% of ancient Greek writing survives. Sophocles wrote 120 plays. Only 7 made it.

Cleopatra lived closer in time to the 1969 Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid (around 2560 BC). The pyramids were already about 2,500 years old in her lifetime.

The Great Pyramids of Giza were once covered in polished white limestone blocks so smooth that a knife blade could not fit between them. In sunlight they blazed like mirrors across the desert. In 1303, an earthquake loosened the casing. A sultan stripped the stones to build mosques in Cairo - and the rough stepped core we see today is what was left behind.