Float your boat
Ancient Egypt was largely desert, just as it is today. But a great civilisation grew up along the banks of the vast River Nile. The river and its countless waterways encouraged the Egyptians to become skilled boat-builders. Their craft ranged from light skiffs made of papyrus reeds to huge wooden barges capable of transporting the giant stones used to build pyramids. These vessels were built from Lebanese cedar planks, cleverly stitched with rope to form a watertight hull. Ancient Egyptians were great sailors but they did have two significant natural advantages. Most journeys took place along the Nile's predominately north-south course. If a boat was sailing north, towards the sea, the current helped it along. And, on south-bound journeys, the prevailing winds made sailing a breeze.

Reed all about it
Once Egypt was unified, around 3100 BC, a civil service developed to administrate the sprawling new kingdom. Egyptian bureaucrats needed accurate records but the civilisation's original form of non-alphabetic writing, hieroglyphs carved on to stone tablets, proved too clumsy for this task. Instead, the Egyptians invented a sort of paper made from the versatile papyrus reed. Thin strips of the reed were laid at right angles to one another, then pressed and dried in the hot sun. The result was a durable "paper" that could be used for writing. Around 2600 BC, Egyptian scholars and administrators adopted hieratic script, an abbreviated form of hieroglyphs. Hieratic script was used for all sorts of writing, from business documents to historical epics and textbooks.

The right tool
Ancient Egyptians were skilled toolmakers who were working copper from around 4000 BC. Copper tools were valuable assets and workers would be obliged to return them to their foremen at the end of a shift, so that they could be counted and locked away. Egyptians were able to turn out high quality tools because their forges were the hottest in the ancient world, thanks to a foot-operated pottery and leather bellows system that pumped air into the furnaces. Carpentry blossomed as a result of widely available, well-made tools and Egypt imported large amounts of timber from Lebanon and Syria to fuel a burgeoning trade in fine furniture.

Class glass
By around 1340 BC, Egyptian artisans were making glass. But they didn't blow glass in the modern fashion. Instead, they used a moulding process known as core forming. They began by making a mould of sand and dung (they had plenty of both in ancient Egypt) and fixing it to a metal rod. This mould was then heated and dipped into molten glass or rolled in ground glass. The process was repeated until several layers had built up. Decorative molten glass bands or handles might then be added. After slow cooling, the core was broken up and a delicate glass vessel emerged. Glass-making was labour-intensive and time-consuming, so only the richest Egyptians could afford it.

All dolled up
When Cleopatra beguiled Julius Caesar and Mark Antony during the final years of ancient Egypt, she was building on
a fine tradition in the arts of personal presentation and decoration. Ancient Egyptian noblewomen in particular were the most beautifully turned out in the civilised world. They wore intricate wigs made out of human hair and dressed in fine linens patiently pleated by their maids. Make-up was an important part of an Egyptian woman's identity. Most wore dark kohl on upper and lower eyelids, to accentuate the eyes and cut down on glare from the sun. They also used green eye shadow, made from ground malachite, to focus even more attention on their eyes. Ancient Egyptians also shared our modern obsession with removing body hair, even shaving their scalps completely smooth. This wasn't just for show, though: if you had no body hair then the lice had nowhere to hide!