The temple was dark, lit only by scattered torches. The young boy blinked as priests walked by him, muttering words he had to strain to understand. He moved closer to his mother, who held him close, murmuring the same words as the priests. With a sigh, the boy leaned on his mothers arms and rested.

She stroked his head as her son slept, keeping an ever-wary eye on the sealed doors of the temple. The war, the running, the hiding of the previous months had worn them all out, but none so much as her. With an oddly peaceful complacency, she knew and accepted that her last day was near.

Despite her readiness to move on, she did not want to be forgotten. And so, with urgency, she brought books to her son every day, trying desperately to re-teach him her language, but the hieroglyphics were muddled in her son's mind, and he spoke Greek much more often than his native language.

Weeks past in the dark temple, and as her strength waned, she knew that the few dozen of the temple were the last of her people, and it was only a matter of time before the invaders found them there. Even more desperately, she tried to teach her son the old ways, the old culture, and though he tried, he could never remember.

Then, one day, the dark temple was filled with light.

It was chaos; fire, swords, arrows everywhere; people running, blood splattering, the whinny of a panicked horse. The boy ran, ran, ran, his mother long separated from him (perhaps longer than either of them knew). He tried to hide, under the books, behind the shelves, anywhere, but all was turning to fire and his face streaked with tears.

Suddenly, a hand grabbed him. Foreign words were shouted at his face, but though he did not understand what was being said to him, he understood what was behind the man who had grabbed him. He understood that the figure lying there, covered in blood and hair already catching fire, was his mom.

And he understood that he was now the only Egypt.

And he understood that the old ways had vanished. He no longer recognized the words and writings of his mother and their people, the words Horus, Anubis, Ra, they had no meaning.

He was nothing, no culture of his own, just the pawn that had been passed from the Assyrians, to the Greeks, and now to the man holding him.

Quickly, the man and his soldiers dragged him out of the flaming temple as the fire began to overwhelm the whole building. The man and the boy he held watched as the temple was slowly engulfed in flames and the last of the Ancient Egyptians were eradicated.

The man who grabbed him turned to him and grinned, in sneering triumph. He had light skin, and his hair was shaggy and brown. He wore a long red cape, already full of tatters. A corner was on fire, and he merely turned and stomped out the fire, the new mark indistinguishable from the other old war marks on the cape.

Foreign words were spoken to him, and soon he came to understand their meaning.

"You are now part of the Roman Empire"

In the next years, the few times Egypt had to himself were spent hiding around the Great pyramids. He would search them for hours, hoping to find something, anything to help him understand them, as he no longer did. He knew his mother had seen them made, but he knew not why or how they were constructed, nor what the symbols written on them meant. Still, it was a comfort to be in the presence of his mother's works; his heritage.

Slowly, as Egypt grew up, he realized one thing: He was not Egypt. He was just a pawn, a piece of territory passed from empire to empire as a prize piece of land. He had no language of his own, only languages given to him by others. What good was Greek, Latin, and Arabic if he couldn't even read his mother's handwriting?

As long as he was to be considered nothing, he may as well act as nothing. Slowly, Egypt stopped talking, stopped writing, stopped communicating, fine with just being handed from empire to empire as others pleased, knowing he had no say no matter what language he would plead in.

And so eventually Egypt was believed to be mute, dumb or both by most of the worlds, as the Muslim empires handed him around dynasty to dynasty, for the last he spoke was when the Byzantine had briefly owned him.

After a small period of not talking, he feared that if he didn't use his voice at all for years, he may actually become a mute from under-use of voice. So, as he fell asleep alone every night, he hummed a melody he remembered his mother singing to him, though he remembered not the words of the song nor their meaning.

And so he remained completely silent, year after year until a very unique experience happened upon his land.

A/N: So, this just came to my mind when watching a movie in world history. Part of it was about the end of Ancient Egyptian culture, where a few priests hid in a temple until the Romans found it and burned it down. At this point the Assyrian and Greeks had already conquered Egypt before, and had started the culture of the modern Egypt we see nowadays.

I am not sure about how incredibly accurate my source is, as it was a movie I saw once and preserved the details in my memory, so don't count this information for a school project or anything.

I should upload the second part within one or two weeks.