Egypt, a country linking northeast Africa with the Middle East, dates to the time of the pharaohs. Millennia-old monuments sit along the fertile Nile River Valley, including Giza's colossal Pyramids and Great Sphinx as well as Luxor's hieroglyph-lined Karnak Temple and Valley of the Kings tombs. The capital, Cairo, is home to Ottoman landmarks like Muhammad Ali Mosque and the Egyptian Museum, a trove of antiquities Egypt is famous for the Pyramids, Sahara Desert, and Nile River. It's known for its ruins, historical places, and sites of world wonders. It is also famous for its mesmerizing beaches, coral reefs, and sea cruises. Egyptians are also known for their hospitality and generosity.
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 Abbasid caliphate.
Alexandria, sometimes known as the “Queen of the Mediterranean”, features some of Egypt’s most beautiful Greco-Roman ruins. The haunting wilderness of the Western Desert, with its vast expanses of sand dunes and spectacular desert scenery, is also host to an array of fascinating oasis towns and villages, each with their own culture and ancient monuments.
