Egypt
Capital: Cairo · North Africa
Home of one of humanity's oldest civilizations — the Nile Valley culture of the pharaohs — and later a center of Coptic Christianity and Islamic learning at al-Azhar.
Ethnic communities
- Egyptians (Nile Valley)Heirs to pharaonic, Coptic and Islamic traditions
- NubiansAncient Nile culture between Aswan and Sudan; distinct languages and music
- BedouinNomadic Arab tribes of Sinai and the deserts
- Siwi BerbersAmazigh oasis community of Siwa
More communities of Egypt
- Saidi (Upper Egyptians) · Nile-valley farmers keeping the oldest folk traditions and tahtib stick art
- Fellahin of the Delta · The green Delta's cultivators — heirs of pharaonic field craft
- Nubians (Kenuz & Fadicca) · Displaced by the High Dam; language, song and painted houses endure
- Ababda Beja · Eastern Desert nomads on the ancient Red Sea gold roads
- Bisharin Beja · Camel herders of the far southeast, kin to Sudan's Beja
- Siwi Amazigh · Berber-speaking oasis of Siwa — Amun's oracle and date groves
- Sinai Bedouin · Tarabin, Muzeina and kin — mountain and coast tribal law (urf)
- Awlad Ali Bedouin · Western Desert tribes from the Libyan marches to Alamein
- Copts · Egypt's ancient Christians — liturgy in the pharaohs' last language
- Rashaida · 19th-century Arabian migrants along the Red Sea coast
- Maaza Bedouin · Eastern Desert herders between Nile and sea
- Fayyum & oasis communities · Basin farmers of Egypt's garden depressions
- Halayeb Beja communities · Border-region pastoralists of the southeast triangle
- Dom communities · Historic itinerant metalworker and entertainer groups
- Alexandrian heritage communities · Levantine, Greek and Armenian threads of the port city
Languages
Major languages: Arabic, Coptic (liturgical), Nubian languages, Siwi (Berber)
Language families: Afro-Asiatic (Semitic, Egyptian, Berber); Nilo-Saharan (Nubian)
Historical kingdoms & states
- • Ancient Egypt (Old, Middle, New Kingdoms)
- • Kingdom of Kush (Nubia)
- • Fatimid Caliphate
- • Mamluk Sultanate
Heritage sites
- • Pyramids of Giza
- • Ancient Thebes (Luxor)
- • Abu Simbel
- • Historic Cairo
- • Saint Catherine's Monastery
Cultural highlights
National heroes of Egypt
See all African heroesFigures widely honoured here, across politics, sport, the arts and public life.
- Science, business & activism1946–2016
Ahmed Zewail
Chemistry
Won the 1999 Nobel Prize in Chemistry for femtosecond spectroscopy, which made it possible to watch chemical bonds break in real time.
- Politics & liberation1918–1970
Gamal Abdel Nasser
Pan-Arabism and nationalisation
Nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956 and became the defining voice of Arab nationalism and of nonalignment. His record on political pluralism remains sharply criticised.
- Science, business & activismb. 1935
Magdi Yacoub
Cardiac surgery
Pioneer of heart and lung transplantation who performed thousands of operations in Britain and founded a free cardiac centre in Aswan.
- Sportb. 1978
Mohamed Aboutrika
Football
Al Ahly's great playmaker, twice a continental champion and twice African Footballer of the Year runner-up, known for lifting his shirt to reveal a message of sympathy for Gaza.
- Sportb. 1992
Mohamed Salah
Football
Record-setting Premier League forward and Africa's most decorated modern footballer, whose profile in England has been credited with measurable falls in anti-Muslim incidents.
- Music & the arts1911–2006
Naguib Mahfouz
Literature
Nobel laureate in 1988 for a body of work centred on the alleys of Cairo. Survived a knife attack in 1994 by an assailant who had never read his books.
- Science, business & activism1931–2021
Nawal El Saadawi
Medicine and feminist writing
Physician and psychiatrist who wrote on women's health and sexuality, lost her post at the health ministry for it and was later imprisoned.
- Science, business & activism1917–1952
Sameera Moussa
Nuclear physics
First Egyptian woman to hold a doctorate in atomic radiation and an early campaigner for affordable medical use of nuclear technology. Died in a car crash in California at 35.
- Music & the arts1904–1975
Umm Kulthum
Music
The Star of the East, whose monthly Thursday broadcasts emptied streets across the Arab world. Her funeral drew crowds estimated in the millions.
- Music & the arts1926–2008
Youssef Chahine
Cinema
Director of Cairo Station and Alexandria Why, who discovered Omar Sharif and received a lifetime award at Cannes in 1997.
Deep-dive community profiles
Ababda
Camel herders of Egypt's Eastern Desert between the Nile and the Red Sea, the northernmost of the Beja peoples, who guided caravans to the emerald mines and the Nubian gold roads, and who lost their language to Arabic while keeping everything else.
Open deep profile →Awlad Ali
The Bedouin of Egypt's western desert — a confederation that moved east from Cyrenaica, whose honour code and oral poetry were made famous by an anthropologist's book, and whose coast is now being built over with resorts.
Open deep profile →Beja
The camel lords of the Red Sea Hills — Africa's ancient 'Blemmyes', sword-bearing clans of the Hadendowa, Bisharin and Ababda whose crossed-swords dances, coffee ceremonies and desert codes have held the corridor between Nile and sea for four thousand years.
Open deep profile →Bisharin
Beja camel nomads of the Red Sea hills and the Nubian desert, whose language has no close relatives, whose hair Roman and British soldiers both wrote about, and whose range the Aswan reservoir and the Egypt-Sudan border between them cut in half.
Open deep profile →Copts
Egypt's indigenous Christians — the largest Christian community in the Middle East, whose liturgy preserves the last stage of the ancient Egyptian language, who invented monasticism, and whose calendar still counts the years from Diocletian's persecution.
Open deep profile →Fellahin of the Delta
The cultivators of the Nile Delta — the people who have farmed the same green triangle for five thousand years, whose village life shaped Egyptian literature and cinema, and whose land is now being eaten by concrete and salt.
Open deep profile →Nubians
The people of the Nile between Aswan and Khartoum — heirs of Kush, Meroë and Christian Nubia, whose pharaoh-conquering kingdoms, pyramid fields and living languages make theirs one of the oldest continuous civilizations on earth.
Open deep profile →Saidi (Upper Egyptians)
The people of the southern Nile valley — farmers of a narrow green strip between deserts, keepers of tahtib stick art and mizmar music, of clan-based honour and feud, and of the deepest continuity with the Egypt of the pharaohs.
Open deep profile →Sinai Bedouin
The tribes of the peninsula between two continents — desert and mountain Bedouin whose customary law still settles most disputes among them, who guarded Saint Catherine's monastery for fourteen centuries, and who have been squeezed between tourism, security operations and the loss of their old routes.
Open deep profile →Siwi
The Amazigh of Siwa oasis — the easternmost Berber-speaking community in the world, six hundred kilometres from Cairo, guardians of the oracle Alexander consulted, of a salt-block architecture that dissolves in rain, and of a language spoken nowhere else.
Open deep profile →Zabbaleen
Cairo's garbage collectors, mostly Coptic Christians who came from Upper Egypt with pigs, who recycle around eighty per cent of what they collect, which is roughly double what any municipal system in the world manages.
Open deep profile →