I don’t know about y’all, but I had to take at least three Western Civilization courses in high school and college. Generally, the course started in Egypt, went to Greece, Rome, the Dark Ages (usually, explaining that there really was no such thing), religious schisms, wars, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, Age of Exploration, and, voila, the Industrial Revolution.
What I want to know, is what happens if you take that same root and follow it East. What if you follow the Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans to the East, I want to know how they effected that “other” part of the world.
I know this is a huge question, so I’ve decided to break it up into parts. For the first part, I want to know exactly what became of the Egyptians. What did their language become, how did it influence the cultures around them. It’s not possible that it disapeared (though, it is possible that there is a break in the information that we have).
As this is an ambiguous question, I’m just looking for any interesting information, links, books…anything…
Ancient Egypt didn’t exist in a cultural vacuum. It was contemporaneous with Mesopotamian cultures such as Babylon and (everybody’s favorite) Assyria. Far away, but still within range of influence, was China and even the Indus Valley. Jared Diamond’s popular book Guns, Germs, and Steel discusses how seemingly remote cultures were able to transfer basic technology such as livestock and crops over large distances. Closer to Egypt, but later in history, Phoenician traders and Greeks mixed it up with Egypt. It is this influence on the Greeks that causes most Western Civ classes to start with Egypt, but Greece had more than Egypt as a guide, such as their own ideas and Alexander’s trysts into Asia. The byproduct of Greek, and later Roman, conquests of a weakened Egypt was a cultural dilution, with rulers like the Ptolomys having more connection with Greece than with the ancient Pharaohs.
You may be interested in a book called Empires of the Word by Nicholas Ostler. IIRC, the Egyptian language lasted a long time in Egypt (first attested around 3200 BC, eventually evolving into Demotic, then Coptic, which became a primarily liturgical language before dying out in the 1800s), but never really had any influence outside of Egypt. In that respect it is quite different from languages like Greek and Roman (and English) that had a great deal of influence outside their native speaking region.
The most obvious ommission from western-centric histories is the Muslim world (Ottoman , Persian, and Muhgal empires). These empires were a long way ahead of the Christian world technologically for a long time.