Egypt
Egypt, country located in the northeastern corner of Africa. Egypt’s heartland, the Nile River valley and delta, was the home of one of the principal civilizations of the ancient Middle East and, like Mesopotamia farther east, was the site of one of the world’s earliest urban and literate societies. Pharaonic Egypt thrived for some 3,000 years through a series of native dynasties that were interspersed with brief periods of foreign rule. After Alexander the Great conquered the region in 323 bc, urban Egypt became an integral part of the Hellenistic world. Under the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty, an advanced literate society thrived in the city of Alexandria, but what is now Egypt was conquered by the Romans in 30 bc. It remained part of the Roman Republic and Empire and then part of Rome’s successor state, the Byzantine Empire, until its conquest by Arab Muslim armies in ad 639–642.
EgyptPolitical map of Egypt, showing the disputed areas along the country's border with Sudan.Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc. 
Pyramids dating from the 3rd millennium bc, Giza plateau near Cairo.© Digital Vision/Getty Images
Until the Muslim conquest, great continuity had typified Egyptian rural life. Despite the incongruent ethnicity of successive ruling groups and the cosmopolitan nature of Egypt’s larger urban centres, the language and culture of the rural, agrarian masses—whose lives were largely measured by the annual rise and fall of the Nile River, with its annual inundation—had changed only marginally throughout the centuries. Following the conquests, both urban and rural culture began to adopt elements of Arab culture, and an Arabic vernacular eventually replaced the Egyptian language as the common means of spoken discourse. Moreover, since that time, Egypt’s history has been part of the broader Islamic world, and though Egyptians continued to be ruled by foreign elite—whether Arab, Kurdish, Circassian, or Turkish—the country’s cultural milieu remained predominantly Arab.
Egypt eventually became one of the intellectual and cultural centres of the Arab and Islamic world, a status that was fortified in the mid-13th century when Mongol armies sacked Baghdad and ended the ʿAbbāsid caliphate. The Mamlūk sultans of Egypt, under whom the country thrived for several centuries, established a pseudo-caliphate of dubious legitimacy. But in 1517 the Ottoman Empire defeated the Mamlūks and established control over Egypt that lasted until 1798, when Napoleon I led a French army in a short occupation of the country.
The French occupation, which ended in 1801, marked the first time a European power had conquered and occupied Egypt, and it set the stage for further European involvement. Egypt’s strategic location has always made it a hub for trade routes between Africa, Europe, and Asia, but this natural advantage was enhanced in 1869 by the opening of the Suez Canal, connecting the Mediterranean Sea to the Red Sea. The concern of the European powers (namely France and the United Kingdom, which were major shareholders in the canal) to safeguard the canal for strategic and commercial reasons became one of the most important factors influencing the subsequent history of Egypt. The United Kingdom occupied Egypt in 1882 and continued to exert a strong influence on the country until after World War II (1939–45).
In 1952 a military coup installed a revolutionary regime that promoted a combination of socialism and Pan-Arab nationalism. The new regime’s extreme political rhetoric and its nationalization of the Suez Canal Company prompted the Suez Crisis of 1956, which was only resolved by the intervention of the United States and the Soviet Union, whose presence in the Mediterranean region thereafter kept Egypt in the international spotlight.
During the Cold War, Egypt’s central role in the Arabic-speaking world increased its geopolitical importance as Arab nationalism and inter-Arab relations became powerful and emotional political forces in the Middle East and North Africa. Egypt led the Arab states in a series of wars against Israel but was the first of those states to make peace with the Jewish state, which it did in 1979.
Egypt’s authoritarian political system was long dominated by the president, the ruling party, and the security services. With opposition political activity tightly restricted, decades of popular frustration erupted into mass demonstrations in 2011. The uprising forced Pres. Ḥosnī Mubārak to step down, leaving a council of military officers in control of the country. Power was transferred to an elected government in 2012, and a new constitution was adopted at the end of the year. This elected government, however, was toppled a year later when the military intervened to remove the newly elected president, Mohammed Morsi, a member of the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood, following a series of massive public demonstrations against his administration. (For a discussion of unrest and political change in Egypt in 2011, see Egypt Uprising of 2011.)
The ancient Greek historian Herodotus called Egypt the “gift of the Nile.” Indeed, the country’s rich agricultural productivity—it is one of the region’s major food producers—has long supported a large rural population devoted to working the land. Present-day Egypt, however, is largely urban. The capital city, Cairo, is one of the world’s largest urban agglomerations, and manufacturing and trade have increasingly outstripped agriculture as the largest sectors of the national economy. Tourism has traditionally provided an enormous portion of foreign exchange, but that industry has been subject to fluctuations during times of political and civil unrest in the region.
Land
Egypt’s land frontiers border Libya to the west, Sudan to the south, and Israel to the northeast. Egypt’s border with Sudan is notable for two areas, the Hala’ib Triangle along the Red Sea and Bir Tawil further inland, that are subject to differing claims by the two countries (see Researcher’s Note). In the north its Mediterranean coastline is about 620 miles (1,000 km), and in the east its coastline on the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aqaba is about 1,200 miles (1,900 km).
Relief
The topography of Egypt is dominated by the Nile. For about 750 miles (1,200 km) of its northward course through the country, the river cuts its way through bare desert, its narrow valley a sharply delineated strip of green, abundantly fecund in contrast to the desolation that surrounds it. From Lake Nasser, the river’s entrance into southern Egypt, to Cairo in the north, the Nile is hemmed into its trenchlike valley by bordering cliffs, but at Cairo these disappear, and the river begins to fan out into its delta. The Nile and the delta form the first of four physiographic regions, the others being the Western Desert (Arabic Al-Ṣaḥrāʾ al-Gharbiyyah), the Eastern Desert (Al-Ṣaḥrāʾ al-Sharqiyyah), and the Sinai Peninsula.
The Nile divides the desert plateau through which it flows into two unequal sections—the Western Desert, between the river and the Libyan frontier, and the Eastern Desert, extending to the Suez Canal, the Gulf of Suez, and the Red Sea. Each of the two has a distinctive character, as does the third and smallest of the Egyptian deserts, the Sinai. The Western Desert (a branch of the Libyan Desert) is arid and without wadis (dry beds of seasonal rivers), while the Eastern Desert is extensively dissected by wadis and fringed by rugged mountains in the east. The desert of central Sinai is open country, broken by isolated hills and scored by wadis.
Egypt is not, as is often believed, an entirely flat country. In addition to the mountains along the Red Sea, mountainous areas occur in the extreme southwest of the Western Desert and in the southern Sinai Peninsula. The high ground in the southwest is associated with the ʿUwaynāt mountain mass, which lies just outside Egyptian territory.
The coastal regions of Egypt, with the exception of the delta, are everywhere hemmed in either by desert or by mountain; they are arid or of very limited fertility. The coastal plain in both the north and east tends to be narrow; it seldom exceeds a width of 30 miles (48 km). With the exception of the cities of Alexandria, Port Said, and Suez and a few small ports and resorts such as Marsā Maṭrūh and Al-ʿAlamayn (El-Alamein), the coastal regions are sparsely populated and underdeveloped.
The Nile valley and delta
The Nile delta, or Lower Egypt, covers an area of 9,650 square miles (25,000 sq km). It is about 100 miles (160 km) long from Cairo to the Mediterranean, with a coastline stretching some 150 miles (240 km) from Alexandria to Port Said. As many as seven branches of the river once flowed through the delta, but its waters are now concentrated in two, the Damietta Branch to the east and the Rosetta Branch to the west. Though totally flat apart from an occasional mound projecting through the alluvium, the delta is far from featureless; it is crisscrossed by a maze of canals and drainage channels. Much of the delta coast is taken up by the brackish lagoons of lakes Maryūṭ, Idkū, Burullus, and Manzilah. The conversion of the delta to perennial irrigation has made possible the raising of two or three crops a year, instead of one, over more than half of its total area.
The cultivated portion of the Nile valley between Cairo and Aswān varies from 5 to 10 miles (8 to 16 km) in width, although there are places where it narrows to a few hundred yards and others where it broadens to 14 miles (23 km). Since the completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1970, the 3,900-square mile (10,100 square km) valley has been under perennial irrigation.
Until it was flooded by the waters impounded behind the High Dam to form Lake Nasser, the Nubian valley of the Nile extended for 160 miles (250 km) between the town of Aswān and the Sudanese border—a narrow and picturesque gorge with a limited cultivable area. The 100,000 or so inhabitants were resettled, mainly in the government-built villages of New Nubia, at Kawm Umbū (Kom Ombo), north of Aswān. Lake Nasser was developed during the 1970s for its fishing and as a tourist area, and settlements have grown up around it.
The Eastern Desert
The Eastern Desert comprises almost one-fourth of the land surface of Egypt and covers an area of about 85,690 square miles (221,900 square km). The northern tier is a limestone plateau consisting of rolling hills, stretching from the Mediterranean coastal plain to a point roughly opposite Qinā on the Nile. Near Qinā, the plateau breaks up into cliffs about 1,600 feet (500 metres) high and is deeply scored by wadis, which make the terrain very difficult to traverse. The outlets of some of the main wadis form deep bays, which contain small settlements of seminomads. The second tier includes the sandstone plateau from Qinā southward. The plateau is also deeply indented by ravines, but they are relatively free from obstacles, and some are usable as routes. The third tier consists of the Red Sea Hills and the Red Sea coastal plain. The hills run from near Suez to the Sudanese border; they are not a continuous range but consist of a series of interlocking systems more or less in alignment. A number of peaks in the Red Sea Hills rise to more than 6,000 feet (1,800 metres), and the highest, Mount Shāʿib al-Banāt, reaches 7,175 feet (2,187 metres). They are geologically complex, with ancient igneous and metamorphic rocks. These include granite that, in the neighbourhood of Aswān, extends across the Nile valley to form the First Cataract—that is, the first set of rapids on the river. At the foot of the Red Sea Hills the narrow coastal plain widens southward, and parallel to the shore there are almost continuous coral reefs. In popular conception and usage, the Red Sea littoral can be regarded as a subregion in itself.
The Western Desert
The Western Desert comprises two-thirds of the land surface of Egypt and covers an area of about 262,800 square miles (680,650 square km). From its highest elevation—more than 3,300 feet (1,000 metres)—on the plateau of Al-Jilf al-Kabīr in the southeast, the rocky plateau slopes gradually northeastward to the first of the depressions that are a characteristic feature of the Western Desert—that containing the oases of Al-Khārijah and Al-Dākhilah. Farther north are the oases of Al-Farāfirah and Al-Baḥriyyah. Northwestward from the latter the plateau continues to fall toward the Qattara Depression (Munkhafaḍ al-Qaṭṭārah), which is uninhabited and virtually impassable by modern vehicles. West of the Qattara Depression and near the Libyan border is the largest and most populous oasis, that of Siwa. It has been inhabited for thousands of years and is less influenced by modern development. South of the Qattara Depression, and extending west to the Libyan border, the Western Desert is composed of great ridges of blown sand interspersed with stony tracts. Beyond the Qattara Depression northward, the edge of the plateau follows the Mediterranean Sea, leaving a narrow coastal plain.
Sinai Peninsula
The Sinai Peninsula comprises a wedge-shaped block of territory with its base along the Mediterranean Sea coast and its apex bounded by the Gulfs of Suez and Aqaba; it covers an area of approximately 23,000 square miles (59,600 square km). Its southern portion consists of rugged, sharply serrated mountains. These reach elevations of more than 8,000 feet (2,400 metres); among them is Mount Catherine (Jabal Kātrīnā), Egypt’s highest mountain, which has an elevation of 8,668 feet (2,642 metres). The central area of Sinai consists of two plateaus, Al-Tīh and Al-ʿAjmah, both deeply indented and dipping northward toward Wadi al-ʿArīsh. Toward the Mediterranean Sea, the northward plateau slope is broken by dome-shaped hills; between them and the coast are long, parallel lines of dunes, some of which are more than 300 feet (100 metres) high. The most striking feature of the coast itself is a salt lagoon, Lake Bardawīl, which stretches for some 60 miles (95 km).
Drainage
Apart from the Nile, the only natural perennial surface drainage consists of a few small streams in the mountains of the southern Sinai Peninsula. Most of the valleys of the Eastern Desert drain westward to the Nile. They are eroded by water but normally dry; only after heavy rainstorms in the Red Sea Hills do they carry torrents. The shorter valleys on the eastern flank of the Red Sea Hills drain toward the Red Sea; they, too, are normally dry. Drainage in the mountains of the Sinai Peninsula is toward the gulfs of Suez and Aqaba; as in the Red Sea Hills, torrent action has produced valleys that are deeply eroded and normally dry.
The central plateau of the Sinai drains northward toward Wadi al-ʿArīsh, a depression in the desert that occasionally carries surface water. One of the features of the Western Desert is its aridity, as shown by the absence of drainage lines. There is, however, an extensive water table beneath the Western Desert. Where the water table comes near the surface it has been tapped by wells in some oases.
