Ancient History, Part IIb: Ancient Egypt

Note: Post on Ancient Egypt continued from "Ancient History, Part IIa: Ancient Egypt".

Western Civilization Checklist: Religion.
Ancient Egyptians took their religion very seriously. This can be attributed to the fact that they believed their very lives and livelihoods depended upon saying the right thing, to the right god/goddess, at the right time, in the right way. Crops- and food sources- depended upon the Nile River flooding just-enough-but-not-too-much, and Ancient Egyptians believed that the Nile flooding depended entirely upon the gods' will.
This is complicated by the Ancient Egyptians' confusing pantheon of gods/goddesses. For one thing, the pharaoh was considered a god-on-earth, and a 'true god' when he died. (Some historians claim that he even got his own national holiday.) Also, each individual town or area had their own little pantheon of mother, father, and child gods, as well as the 'usual' pantheon of nationally-known gods. For another thing , the gods and goddesses seem to have complicated power plays at times, based entirely on the royal courts' issues at the time.
For instance, originally Re, or Ra, was the chief sun god, and occasionally known as the creator god. When a pharaoh from a particular town with its own god, Amun/Amen/Aman (depending upon which Egyptian vowel appears or doesn't appear) arose, Re/Ra became Amun-Re (and all the spellings variations thereof).
This was not uncommon in Ancient Egyptian mythology- two or more gods becoming one god, or one god becoming two or more gods with a confusing 'supporting' story.
Another aspect of Ancient Egyptian religon is their fear of death. They believed that, if their bodies were preserved properly and they passed some considerable tests, they could live forever in the Underworld/Afterlife. Interestingly and somewhat disturbingly, they often killed animals, wives and servants to take with them.
They also had a tendency to combine gods/goddesses, particularly in the later period. For instance, Isis (goddess of healing and Osiris's wife) at some point absorbed Bastet (goddess of cats) and Hathor (goddess of music, crops, etc.), as well as possibly Nepthys (Isis's sister and the goddess of death). She absorbed their traits and some of what they wore.

Western Civilization Checklist: Learning and Legends.
Ancient Egyptian mythology is confusing, for the simple, stubborn insistence that their gods were once human (or something like it). A sample story, upon which all of Egyptian history is based, goes something like this: Osiris (later god of the dead and the Underworld) was pharaoh, his chief wife being Isis (later a goddess herself, sometimes of healing, and/or women, and/or something else altogether). Osiris's brother, Set/Seth (later the god of Evil and several other things, sometimes including Darkness) wanted to be pharaoh (not an unusual situation in real politics of the time), so he killed Osiris, cut him into pieces, and scattered him throughout Upper and Lower Egypt. Isis, who had given birth to she and Osiris's son Horus in the meantime, raised Horus and travelled all over Egypt to gather up her husband's pieces and put him back together again through her magic. (The timelines I've found are a little sketchy on how she managed both at the same time.) Osiris was later well again (again, the information's a little sketchy on how), but could not return to being pharaoh because he had died (for reasons I, again, can't decipher), so he went to rule the Underworld after Horus killed Seth and took the throne.
Learning was mostly restricted to the men of the upper classes and scribes. Scribes were more likely to know how to read and write the formal and complicated hieroglyphics than some others, but the pharaoh and some others would have been able to do so. Mathmetics and architecture were studied by men of learning as well, contributing to such feats as the building of the pyraminds and the Sphinx.

Conclusion.
Ancient Egyptians were clearly a great Western civilization, if a much different kind of one than we know today.