Egypt

Egypt (Arabic: مصر, romanized Misr, in Egyptian Arabic Máṣr, listen ( help· info), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a Middle Eastern country in North Africa. While the country is geographically situated in Africa, the Sinai Peninsula, east of the Suez Canal, is a land bridge to Asia.
Covering an area of about 1,001,450 square kilometres (386,560 mi²), Egypt borders Libya to the west, Sudan to the south, and Israel and the Gaza Strip to the northeast; on the north and the east are the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, respectively.
Egypt is the fifteenth most populous country in the world. The vast majority of its 78.8 million population (2006) live near the banks of the Nile River (about 40,000 km² or 15,450 mi²), where the only arable agricultural land is found. Large areas of land are part of the Sahara Desert and are sparsely inhabited. About half of the Egyptian people today are urban, living in the densely populated centers of greater Cairo, the largest city in Africa, and Alexandria.
Egypt is famous for its ancient civilization and some of the world's most ancient and important monuments, including the Giza Pyramids, the Karnak Temple, the Valley of the Kings and the Great Sphinx of Giza; the southern city of Luxor contains a particularly large number of ancient artifacts. Today, Egypt is widely regarded as the main political and cultural centre of the Arab and Middle Eastern regions.

Etymology

Misr, the Arabic and official name for modern Egypt, is of Semitic origin directly cognate with the Hebrew מִצְרַיִם (Mitzráyim), meaning "the two straits", and possibly means "a country" or "a state". The ancient name for the country, kemet, or "black land," is derived from the fertile black soils deposited by the Nile floods, distinct from the 'red land' (deshret) of the desert. This name became keme in a later stage of Coptic. The English name "Egypt" came via the Latin word Aegyptus derived from the ancient Greek word Αίγυπτος (Aiguptos). This word may in turn be derived from the ancient Egyptian phrase wt-k3-pt ("Hwt ka Ptah") meaning "home of the Ka (part of the soul) of Ptah," the name of a temple of the god Ptah at Memphis.

Geography

Egypt is bordered by Libya on the west, Sudan on the south, and on Israel on the northeast. Egypt's important role in geopolitics stems from its strategic position: a transcontinental nation, it possesses a land bridge (the Isthmus of Suez) between Africa and Asia, which in turn is traversed by a navigable waterway (the Suez Canal) that connects the Mediterranean Sea with the Indian Ocean via the Red Sea.
Towns and cities include Alexandria, one of the great ancient cities, Aswan, Asyut, Cairo, the modern Egyptian capital, El-Mahalla El-Kubra, Giza, the site of the Pyramid of Khufu, Hurghada, Luxor, Kom Ombo, Port Safaga, Port Said, Sharm el Sheikh,Shubra-El-Khema, Suez, where the Suez Canal is located, Zagazig, and Al-Minya.
Deserts: Egypt includes parts of the Sahara Desert and of the Libyan Desert. These deserts were referred to as the "red land" in ancient Egypt, and they protected the Kingdom of the Pharaohs from western threats.
Oases include: Bahariya Oasis, Dakhleh Oasis, Farafra Oasis, Kharga Oasis, Siwa Oasis. An oasis is a fertile or green area in the midst of a desert.

Culture

Egypt's capital city, Cairo, is Africa's largest city and has been renowned for centuries as a center of learning, culture and commerce. The Egyptian Academy of the Arabic Language is responsible for regulating the Arabic Language (Arabic:اللغة العربية ) throughout the world.
Egypt has had a thriving media and arts industry since the late 19th century, today with more than 30 satellite channels and over 100 motion pictures produced each year. Cairo in fact has long been known as the "Hollywood of the East." To bolster its media industry further, especially with the keen competition from the Persian Gulf Arab States and Lebanon, a large media city was built. Egypt is also the only Arab country with an opera house.

History

The regularity and richness of the annual Nile River flood, coupled with semi-isolation provided by deserts to the east and west, allowed for the development of one of the world's great civilizations. A unified kingdom was founded circa 3100 BC by King Narmer, and a series of dynasties ruled in Egypt for the next three millennia. The last native dynasty, known as the Thirtieth Dynasty, fell to the Persians in 343 BC who dug the predecessor of the Suez canal and connected the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Later, Egypt fell to the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Persians again.
It was the Muslim Arabs who introduced Islam and the Arabic language in the seventh century to the Egyptians, who gradually adopted both. Muslim rulers nominated by the Islamic Caliphate remained in control of Egypt for the next six centuries. A local military caste, the Mamluks took control about 1250 and continued to govern even after the conquest of Egypt by the Ottoman Turks in 1517.
Following the completion of the Suez Canal in 1869, Egypt became an important world transportation hub; however, the country also fell heavily into debt. Ostensibly to protect its investments, the United Kingdom seized control of Egypt's government in 1882, but nominal allegiance to the Ottoman Empire continued until 1914.
Almost fully independent from the UK since 1922, the Egyptian Parliament drafted and implemented a new constitution in 1923 under the leadership of the popular revolutionary Saad Zaghlul. Between 1924-1936, there existed a short-lived but successful attempt to model Egypt's constitutional government after the European style of government; known as Egypt's Liberal Experiment. The British, however, retained a degree of control which led to continued instability in the government. In 1952, a military coup d'état forced King Farouk I, a constitutional monarch, to abdicate in support of his son King Ahmed Fouad II.
Egypt's capital Cairo is the largest city in Africa and the Middle East Finally, the Egyptian Republic was declared on 18 June 1953 with General Muhammad Naguib as the first President of the Republic. After Naguib was also forced to resign in 1954 by Gamal Abdel Nasser, the real architect of the 1952 movement, the latter assumed power as President and nationalized the Suez Canal leading to the 1956 Suez Crisis. Nasser came out of the war an Arab hero, and Nasserism won widespread influence in the region though was met with mixed reactions amongst Egyptians, many of whom had previously been indifferent to Arab nationalism.
Between 1958 and 1961, Nasser undertook to form a union between Egypt and Syria known as the United Arab Republic. This attempt too was met with mixed reactions, and it was clear that many Egyptians resented finding that the name of their country, which had endured for thousands of years, was suddenly eliminated. Three years after the 1967 Six Day War, in which Egypt lost the Sinai to Israel, Nasser died and was succeeded by Anwar Sadat, who presented his takeover in terms of a Corrective Revolution. Sadat switched Egypt's Cold War allegiance from the Soviet Union to the United States, expelling Soviet advisors in 1972, and launched the Infitah economic reform, while violently clamping down on religious and secular opposition alike. Egypt's name was also restored.
In 1973, Egypt, along with Syria, launched a surprise attack on Israel in the October War (known also as the Yom Kippur War), which, despite not being a complete military success, was by most accounts a political victory. Both the United States and the USSR intervened, and a cease-fire was reached between Egypt and Israel. In 1979, Sadat made peace with Israel in exchange for the Sinai, a move that sparked enormous controversy in the Arab world and led to Egypt's expulsion from the Arab League (it was readmitted in 1989). Sadat was murdered by a religious fundamentalist in 1981, and succeeded by Hosni Mubarak.