Overview
Egypt is home to one of the world’s oldest civilizations, which arose along the Nile. The river’s annual floods sustained agriculture, and the civilization produced hieroglyphic writing along with monumental pyramids and temples. Today it is the Arab Republic of Egypt, one of the most populous countries in Africa and the Arab world.
The major eras
The unification of Upper and Lower Egypt c. 3100 BC opened roughly 3,000 years of pharaonic history, conventionally grouped into the Old, Middle, and New Kingdoms with intermediate periods between them, followed by the Late Period. Alexander the Great’s conquest in 332 BC began about a millennium of Greek (Ptolemaic) and then Roman–Byzantine rule, during which Egypt was the grain supplier of Rome and an early center of Christianity, home of the Coptic Church. The Arab conquest of 639–642 opened the Islamic era: Fustat and later Cairo were founded, the Fatimid, Ayyubid, and Mamluk states made Cairo a leading metropolis of the Islamic world, and Ottoman rule followed from 1517. Muhammad Ali launched state-led modernization from 1805, the Suez Canal opened in 1869, and Britain occupied Egypt in 1882. Nominal independence came in 1922 as the Kingdom of Egypt; the 1952 revolution made Egypt a republic under Nasser, Sadat, and Mubarak, and the 2011 revolution opened a turbulent decade.