How have scholars learned about the origins of the ancient Nile Valley civilization?
Read “Before the Mummies.” Use the following guidelines to help you understand the nature of the research the article describes. The Question: Let’s start at the beginning—of Anthony Mills’s and Mary McDonald’s research and of our own exploration into how research is conducted. What’s at the beginning? The question! Sometimes you ask a question because you don’t understand something. Other times you ask because you’re curious. Scholars ask questions for the same reasons, but what makes their questions different is that they are often rooted in a lot more information than the average person has: everything they have read, everything they have learned from other people asking similar questions—in short, “the knowledge of their field.” (For example, archeology and, specifically, the archeology of ancient Egypt.) What was the question Mills and McDonald asked about the Nile Valley civilization? Why hadn’t other archeologists seriously pursued the question before? Write the question at the
