Egypt, country located in the northeastern The Western Desert
corner of Africa. Egypt’s heartland, the Nile The Western Desert comprises two-thirds of the
River valley and delta, was the home of one of
the principal civilizations of the ancient Middle
East and, like Mesopotamia farther east, was
the site of one of the world’s earliest urban and
literate societies. Pharaonic Egypt thrived for
some 3,000 years through a series of native
dynasties that were interspersed with brief
EGYPT periods of foreign rule. After Alexander the
Great conquered the region in 323 bc, urban
Egypt became an integral part of the Hellenistic
world. Under the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty, an
advanced literate society thrived in the city of
Alexandria, but what is now Egypt was
conquered by the Romans in 30 bc. It remained
part of the Roman Republic and Empire and
then part of Rome’s successor state, the
Byzantine Empire, until its conquest by Arab
Muslim armies in ad 639–642.
Toby Rodriguez Egypt eventually became one of the intellectual
and cultural centres of the Arab and Islamic
Boris Rivera world, a status that was fortified in the mid-13th
century when Mongol armies sacked Baghdad
8A and ended the ʿAbbāsid caliphate. The Mamlūk
sultans of Egypt, under whom the country
thrived for several centuries, established a
pseudo-caliphate of dubious legitimacy.
land surface of Egypt and covers an area of about
262,800 square miles (680,650 square km). From its
highest elevation—more than 3,300 feet (1,000
metres)—on the plateau of Al-Jilf al-Kabīr in the
southeast, the rocky plateau slopes gradually
northeastward to the first of the depressions that
are a characteristic feature of the Western Desert—
that containing the oases of Al-Khārijah and Al-
Dākhilah. Farther north are the oases of Al-Farāfirah
and Al-Baḥriyyah. Northwestward from the latter
the plateau continues to fall toward the Qattara
Depression (Munkhafaḍ al-Qaṭṭārah), which is
uninhabited and virtually impassable by modern
vehicles.
ANIMAL LIFE
Domestic animals include buffalo, camels,
donkeys, sheep, and goats, the last of which
are particularly noticeable in the Egyptian
countryside. The animals that figure so
prominently on the ancient Egyptian friezes—
hippopotamuses, giraffes, and ostriches—no
longer exist in Egypt