A day in an ancient Egyptian village: warm-up · Grade 4

The passage and its 4 questions

Directions: Read the passage carefully. Then answer the questions in full sentences.

• Meret woke at sunrise on the flat roof of her family's mud-brick house. On hot nights, the whole family slept up there, where the breeze was cool. Below, her mother was already grinding grain between two stones to make the day's bread.
• Meret's village sat beside the Nile River. Each summer the river flooded, spreading rich black mud over the fields. That is why Egyptians called their land Kemet, the black land.
• Now the water had gone down, and the fields were green with wheat and flax.
• After a breakfast of bread and onions, Meret walked with her father to the fields. He used a shaduf, a long pole with a bucket on one end and a heavy weight on the other, to lift water from a canal. Meret helped pull weeds between the rows.
• At midday, a scribe from the town came to measure the fields. He wrote with a reed pen on a sheet of papyrus. "He is working out how much grain we must send to the pharaoh's storehouses," Father explained.
• In the evening, Meret played senet with her brother on a wooden game board. Then the family climbed back up to the roof. Above the quiet river, the stars came out one by one.
• 1. Where did Meret's family sleep on hot nights?
• 2. Why did Egyptians call their land Kemet?
• 3. What is a shaduf? Use clues from paragraph 3.
• 4. Which sentence do you think is most important? Why?