Egypt is a country in north-east Africa with around 115 million people, almost all of them living along the Nile. The country is roughly a million square kilometres and about 95% of it is desert, so nearly everyone is squeezed into a green strip a few kilometres wide beside the river. It also holds the last surviving wonder of the ancient world and one of the longest recorded histories on Earth — over 5,000 years.
A Country in a Line
Look at a satellite photograph of Egypt at night and you see a bright thin line with a fan at the top. That is the Nile and its delta, and it is where everyone lives.
About 99% of Egyptians live on around 5% of the land. The population density along the river is among the highest in the world, comparable to Bangladesh, while the deserts either side are essentially empty.
The Greek historian Herodotus called Egypt the gift of the Nile around 2,500 years ago, and it is still the plainest description of the country. No river, no Egypt.
The Nile Flows North
The Nile is usually called the longest river in the world at around 6,650 kilometres, and it flows north — which confuses people used to maps where north is up.
Rivers flow downhill, and in Egypt the land is higher in the south. That is why ancient Egyptians called the south Upper Egypt and the north Lower Egypt, which looks upside down on a modern map and is entirely correct.
Every year until 1970 the Nile flooded, spreading a layer of black fertile silt across the fields. Egyptians called their country Kemet, the black land, after that soil, and the desert beyond it Deshret, the red land. The Aswan High Dam ended the annual flood, which stopped the destruction and also stopped the free fertiliser.
The Pyramids
The Great Pyramid of Giza was built for the pharaoh Khufu around 2560 BCE. It was originally about 146.6 metres tall and stood as the tallest building made by humans for around 3,800 years — a record no other structure has come close to.
It contains roughly 2.3 million blocks of stone, most weighing between two and fifteen tonnes. The base is level to within a couple of centimetres across more than five hectares, and the sides are aligned to true north to within a fraction of a degree.
It was not built by slaves. Archaeologists have excavated the workers' village nearby, complete with bakeries, breweries and a cemetery where workers were buried with honour. They were paid labourers, many of them farmers working during the flood season when the fields were underwater.
How Old Is Old?
Here is the fact that puts Egyptian history in perspective. Cleopatra lived closer in time to the first Moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid.
Cleopatra died in 30 BCE. The Great Pyramid was finished around 2560 BCE — about 2,500 years before her. The Moon landing was in 1969, about 2,000 years after her.
The pyramids were already ancient tourist attractions in Roman times. Greek and Roman visitors carved graffiti on them, and some of it is still legible.
Mummies
Ancient Egyptians believed the dead needed their bodies in the afterlife, so they developed a way to preserve them that worked remarkably well.
The process took about seventy days. Internal organs were removed and stored in jars — except the heart, which was left in place because it was thought to be where thinking and feeling happened. The brain was pulled out through the nose and thrown away, because nobody thought it did anything useful.
The body was packed in natron, a natural salt, for forty days to dry it out, then stuffed, oiled and wrapped in hundreds of metres of linen with protective amulets between the layers. It worked: we can still tell what many pharaohs looked like, what they ate and what diseases they had.
Write Your Name in Hieroglyphs
Egyptian hieroglyphs are a mix of picture-signs and sound-signs, and about 24 of them work roughly like an alphabet.
A reed leaf is roughly an i. An owl is m. A mouth is r. A hand is d. A quail chick is w. A zigzag of water is n. Look up a hieroglyph alphabet chart and you can spell out your name in symbols.
Royal names were written inside an oval loop called a cartouche, which represented a rope encircling the name to protect it. That is what let scholars crack the code: on the Rosetta Stone, found in 1799, the same text appeared in hieroglyphs, in a later Egyptian script and in Greek, and the cartouches let Jean-François Champollion match up royal names in 1822.
Gods and Animals
Ancient Egyptians worshipped over 2,000 gods, many shown with animal heads. Anubis, who guided the dead, had the head of a jackal. Horus, the sky god, had the head of a falcon. Thoth, god of writing, had the head of an ibis. Bastet, protector of the home, was a cat.
Cats were genuinely revered. Killing one, even accidentally, could be punished by death, and families shaved their eyebrows in mourning when a household cat died. Millions of cats were mummified as offerings.
The Sphinx at Giza has a lion's body and a human head, is around 73 metres long and 20 metres tall, and was carved from a single outcrop of limestone. Its nose has been missing for centuries — not shot off by Napoleon's army, despite the story, since drawings made before he arrived already show it gone.
Tutankhamun
Tutankhamun became pharaoh at around nine years old and died at about eighteen. He was a minor king who changed little, and he is the most famous of them all for one reason: nobody robbed his tomb.
Howard Carter found it in the Valley of the Kings in November 1922, essentially intact. It contained over 5,000 objects, including a solid gold coffin weighing 110 kilograms and the gold death mask that has become the symbol of ancient Egypt.
Newspapers invented the curse of the pharaohs after Carter's sponsor Lord Carnarvon died of an infected mosquito bite a few months later. Studies of everyone present at the opening found no unusual death rate at all — Carter himself lived another seventeen years.
Life Along the River
Ordinary ancient Egyptians were not pharaohs or priests. Most were farmers, and their year was organised around the flood into three seasons: inundation, when the fields were under water and people worked on building projects; growing; and harvest.
They ate bread and drank beer as staples — both so central that workers were partly paid in them. Bread was so gritty with sand and stone dust from grinding that Egyptian mummies routinely show badly worn teeth.
Children played with wooden animals on wheels, balls made of leather stuffed with straw, and a board game called senet that was played for over 2,000 years. Boards have been found in tombs, including Tutankhamun's, apparently so the dead could keep playing.
Modern Egypt
Egypt's capital, Cairo, is the largest city in the Arab world and Africa, with a metropolitan population above 20 million. It was founded in 969 CE, thousands of years after the pyramids just across the river.
The official language is Arabic, and around 90% of Egyptians are Muslim with most of the rest Coptic Christian — one of the oldest Christian communities in the world. Cairo's Al-Azhar University, founded in 970, is among the oldest continuously operating universities anywhere.
The Suez Canal, opened in 1869, connects the Mediterranean to the Red Sea and carries around 12% of world trade. In March 2021 a single container ship, the Ever Given, got wedged sideways across it and blocked global shipping for six days.
The Pyramids Were Not the First Thing
Egyptian history is so long that the pyramids are not even at the start of it. Before the Great Pyramid there was the Step Pyramid of Djoser at Saqqara, built around 2670 BCE — the first large stone building anywhere in the world, designed by an architect called Imhotep whose name we still know 4,700 years later.
Before that came the Bent Pyramid and the Red Pyramid at Dahshur, both built for the pharaoh Sneferu. The Bent Pyramid changes angle halfway up, apparently because the builders realised the original slope was too steep and would collapse. It is a mistake preserved in stone at enormous scale.
Egyptians built pyramids for only about a thousand years and then stopped. Later pharaohs, including Tutankhamun, were buried in hidden rock-cut tombs in the Valley of the Kings instead — because a pyramid is a very large sign saying treasure is here, and every single one of them had been robbed.
Things You Might Not Expect
Egypt has beaches and coral reefs. The Red Sea coast has some of the best diving in the world, with over 1,200 fish species, and around 10% of them live nowhere else.
It snows in Egypt occasionally — Cairo saw snow in December 2013 for the first time in over a century, and the Sinai mountains get it more regularly.
And the pyramids were not always bare stone. They were originally covered in smooth white limestone that would have gleamed in the sun, visible for many kilometres. Most of that casing was removed over the centuries and used to build medieval Cairo, though a cap of it survives at the top of Khafre's pyramid. To keep exploring, read about the countries where Arabic is spoken and see the full list of countries in Africa.
