Facts about Egypt
Capital Cairo · Africa
10 topics · about 20 minutes
Egypt links Africa and Asia across the Sinai Peninsula and controls the Suez Canal, one of the most important shipping routes in the world. Its pharaonic civilisation lasted some three thousand years, and the country remains the cultural and media center of the Arab world.
Egypt is overwhelmingly desert, and roughly 95 percent of its people live on the four percent of land the Nile waters. The river runs about 1,500 kilometers through the country before fanning into a Mediterranean delta, and that narrow green ribbon is visible from orbit as a line drawn across an otherwise empty landscape. The Western Desert holds the Great Sand Sea and a handful of oases, the Eastern Desert runs to the Red Sea and its coral, and Sinai is mountainous and forms the only land bridge between Africa and Asia.
Greater Cairo holds over 22 million people and is the media and publishing capital of the Arab world, with Giza and its pyramids on the city’s western edge. Alexandria faces the Mediterranean and was the intellectual center of the ancient world, Luxor and Aswan sit upriver among the pharaonic monuments, and Sharm el-Sheikh and Hurghada anchor the Red Sea diving coast. Nearly every visitor works through some combination of the Giza plateau, a Nile cruise between Luxor and Aswan, and a stretch of Red Sea reef.
- Population
- 107 million
- Area
- 1,001,450 km²
- Currency
- Egyptian pound (E£)
- Official language
- Arabic
- Governorates
- 27
- Highest point
- Mount Catherine, 2,629 m
The Egypt course
Geography of Egypt
Ninety-five percent of the country lives on the four percent of land the Nile reaches.
History of Egypt
Three thousand years of pharaohs, then Persians, Greeks, Romans, Arabs, Ottomans and the British.
Language of Egypt
One Arabic for writing and another for speaking, and the dialect the whole region understands.
Culture of Egypt
The film and publishing capital of the Arab world, and a university running since the 970s.
Economy of Egypt
A canal carrying 12 percent of global trade, tourism, and gas found in the Mediterranean.
Politics of Egypt
A presidential republic where the military has been the central institution since 1952.
Nature & Wildlife of Egypt
Desert-adapted wildlife, Red Sea reefs resisting bleaching, and a major migration corridor.
Food & Cuisine of Egypt
Koshary on the street, fava beans for breakfast, and a word for bread that also means life.
Landmarks of Egypt
The only ancient wonder still standing, an intact tomb found in 1922, and a temple moved uphill.
People & Society of Egypt
The most populous Arab country, median age 24, growing by over a million a year.
Geography of Egypt
Egypt is overwhelmingly desert, and roughly 95 percent of its 107 million people live on the four percent of land watered by the Nile. The river runs about 1,500 kilometers through the country before fanning into a delta on the Mediterranean, and that narrow green strip is visible from orbit as a line across an otherwise empty landscape.
The Western Desert holds the Great Sand Sea and a handful of oases, while the Eastern Desert runs to the Red Sea coast with its coral reefs. Sinai is mountainous and forms the only land bridge between Africa and Asia. The Aswan High Dam, completed in 1970, ended the annual Nile flood that had fertilised Egyptian fields for millennia.
History of Egypt
Upper and Lower Egypt were unified around 3100 BC, beginning a dynastic sequence that ran for roughly three thousand years through the Old, Middle and New Kingdoms. The pyramids at Giza belong to the Old Kingdom, while the New Kingdom produced Hatshepsut, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun and Ramesses II.
Persian, Greek and Roman rule followed, with the Ptolemaic dynasty ending when Cleopatra died in 30 BC. Arab conquest in 641 brought Islam and Arabic, and Ottoman rule lasted from 1517 until British occupation began in 1882. Full independence came in stages, the monarchy fell to army officers in 1952, and Gamal Abdel Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956. Mass protests in 2011 ended Hosni Mubarak’s thirty-year presidency.
Language of Egypt
Modern Standard Arabic is the official language of writing, news and formal speech, while Egyptians talk to each other in Egyptian Arabic, which differs enough in vocabulary and pronunciation to count as a distinct variety. Because Cairo dominated Arab film and music production for most of the 20th century, Egyptian Arabic is the dialect most widely understood across the region.
Ancient Egyptian survived in liturgical use as Coptic, written in a modified Greek alphabet, and it is still chanted in Coptic Orthodox services though it died out as a spoken tongue centuries ago. Deciphering hieroglyphs took until 1822, when Jean-François Champollion worked them out using the Rosetta Stone.
Culture of Egypt
Egypt has been the publishing and film capital of the Arab world since the early 20th century, and Cairo cinema shaped popular taste from Morocco to Iraq. Naguib Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1988, the only Arabic-language writer to do so.
Around 90 percent of Egyptians are Sunni Muslim, with a Coptic Orthodox Christian minority that traces its church to the first century and forms the largest Christian community in the Middle East. Al-Azhar in Cairo, founded in the 970s, is among the oldest universities in continuous operation and remains a leading authority in Sunni scholarship.
Economy of Egypt
The Suez Canal carries roughly 12 percent of global trade in a normal year and generates several billion dollars annually in transit fees, making it one of the state’s most reliable earners. Tourism is the other pillar, though it swings hard with regional security.
Agriculture concentrated in the Nile valley and delta employs a large share of workers, with cotton the historic export crop. Natural gas discoveries in the Mediterranean, especially the Zohr field, turned Egypt into an exporter. The economy has struggled with currency devaluations, high inflation and heavy external debt, and the country is among the largest wheat importers in the world.
Politics of Egypt
Egypt is a presidential republic in which the executive holds dominant power. The president is directly elected, appoints the prime minister and government, and the current constitution dates from 2014 with amendments in 2019 that extended presidential terms.
The military has been the central institution of Egyptian politics since 1952 and holds substantial economic interests alongside its security role. Parliament consists of the House of Representatives and a Senate restored in 2020. Egypt was the first Arab state to sign a peace treaty with Israel, in 1979, and remains a principal mediator in regional negotiations.
Nature & Wildlife of Egypt
Desert covers most of the country, so wildlife is adapted to extreme aridity, including the fennec fox, the Egyptian jerboa and several gazelle species reduced to small remnant herds. The Nile still supports crocodiles above the Aswan dam.
The Red Sea coast holds some of the most biodiverse coral reefs in the world, with over a thousand fish species and reefs that have shown unusual resistance to bleaching as waters warm. Ras Muhammad at the tip of Sinai became the first national park in 1983. Egypt sits on a major bird migration corridor, and millions of raptors and storks funnel through the country each autumn on the way to Africa.
Food & Cuisine of Egypt
Koshary is the national street dish, a filling mix of rice, lentils, macaroni and chickpeas under spiced tomato sauce and fried onions, and it costs little enough to feed anyone. Ful medames, slow-cooked fava beans dressed with oil and lemon, is the standard breakfast and has been eaten in Egypt since antiquity.
Bread is central enough that the Egyptian word for it, aish, also means life, and subsidised loaves are a politically sensitive part of the social contract. Molokhia, a green leaf soup, and mahshi, vegetables stuffed with spiced rice, appear at family meals, while sweets such as basbousa and umm ali close them.
Landmarks of Egypt
The Great Pyramid of Giza, built around 2560 BC for the pharaoh Khufu, stood as the tallest structure on Earth for nearly four thousand years and is the only surviving member of the original Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. The Sphinx guards the same plateau on the edge of Cairo.
Luxor holds the temple complex of Karnak and, across the river, the Valley of the Kings, where Howard Carter found Tutankhamun’s intact tomb in 1922. Abu Simbel in the far south was cut into pieces and moved uphill in the 1960s to save it from the rising reservoir behind the Aswan dam. The Grand Egyptian Museum near Giza now houses the largest collection of pharaonic artefacts anywhere.
People & Society of Egypt
Egypt is the most populous country in the Arab world and the third most populous in Africa, with about 107 million people growing by well over a million a year. That growth strains water supply, housing and job creation in a country with very little habitable land.
Median age is around 24, so the population is young and the labour market must absorb large cohorts of graduates each year. Roughly 43 percent live in cities, with Greater Cairo holding over 22 million people and ranking among the largest urban areas in the world. A new administrative capital east of Cairo has been under construction since 2015.
Reading is one thing, recall is another. Play the Egypt challenge to test what stuck, or create a free account to work through all ten topics as lessons with progress tracking.