Ancient Egypt and the Egyptians have been renowned for their culture and literacy since classical antiquity. The storerooms of knowledge and literature were the libraries of the temples from the third millennium BC down to the fourth century AD. We distinguish three periods of ancient Egyptian history in the third and second millennia BC: the Old Kingdom (c. 2657–2120), the Middle Kingdom (c. 2119–1794), and the New Kingdom (c. 1550–1069). A period of foreign rule followed, and the pharaonic culture and religion were gradually Hellenized under the rule of Alexander and (after 332 BC) his successors, the Ptolemaic dynasty, and in the Roman empire, and finally replaced by Christendom. We can easily speak of 4,000 years of written culture in the Nile Valley if we include the Christian or Coptic period, which ended when the Ancient Egyptian language, of which Coptic is the latest offspring, disappeared and was finally replaced by Arabic in the fourteenth century AD. This immense time period is the frame or scope of this chapter.