Welcome to Getting Curious. I'm Jonathan Benes and every week I sit down for a 40-minute conversation with a brilliant expert to learn all about something that makes me curious.

On our first episode back of the year, we are going to go way back in time with Egyptologist Dr. Catherine Halley, where I asked her, who gave Ancient Egyptians permission to be so advanced?

Welcome to Getting Curious. This is Jonathan Benes. I'm so excited to introduce our expert and our guests this week. Dr. Catherine Halley, you are an Egyptologist and the Assistant Professor at IFA and NYU. Welcome!

Thank you so much. I'm really happy to be here.

Oh my gosh, I'm so excited that you're here. So you study ancient cultures and civilizations in Egypt and it would it's currently Northern Sudan.

Absolutely. Yes, in the Nile Valley, basically, if we want to put it in more geographical terms.

Love, OK, the Nile Valley. So I just want to kind of rewind a little teensy, weenzy bit geographically and time wise for people to kind of get into the flow of like, picture Egypt, Sudan, you know, the BCE of it all.

So then I pulled up a map of the Nile and Sudan. So if anyone is not driving now and you want to pull this up on your thing, you can. So I have it pulled up.

I'm just going to look at it again really quick. OK, so when you say the fourth cataract of the Nile. So is one of those the cataracts like.

No, so so Jonathan right now he's pointing at the kind of triangular bit of the very north of Egypt. That's actually called the Delta. So that's where the Nile goes into the Mediterranean sea.

But if you go south, basically to the border of modern Egypt and Sudan, you get these really rocky areas in the Nile and those are called cataracts.

And they're really important and they were in the ancient world because that means that you can't easily sail across them. So they're almost like natural barriers in the river.

And there's actually six of them and they stretch from the the southern tip of Egypt down to modern day cartoon in Sudan.

Oh, I see cards. So there's six. So there's six cataracts that go from the very southern bit of Egypt. And then where does the Nile stop?

Oh, well, it kind of so it splits in cartoon into the blue Nile and the white Nile and one of them goes to Uganda and the other one goes to Ethiopia.

OK, so ancient Egypt, honey, the original reason that I got curious and why I wanted to have you on was like, what was life like in in a day of like an ancient Egyptian.

That was not the broader question is, but on top of that, it's like the era of ancient Egypt is that is that you're so big that you could even say given average of what ideally like did one era not have running water and then another one like did or something.

Like how much of the of all the ancient Egypt.

So so ancient Egypt, we always talk about it as if it's one thing and it's it's really not I mean, even from a conservative point of view, you're really talking about three and a half thousand BCE all the way through to around 30 BCE.

So you've got a stretch of millennia and actually you can go even further back and there's human occupation in what is now Egypt back to eight or even 10,000 BCE. So it's it's really difficult to to generalize like that.

And it's also really difficult to generalize because what a day would have been for an ancient Egyptian would have buried just hugely depending on your social status, what your position in society was, were you a man or a woman.

This would have caused huge differences in how different people would have experienced life in ancient Egypt.

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