Discover Egypt

Egypt is the gift of the Nile, as Herodotus put it, and almost everything in its history follows the river. The annual flood created the agricultural surplus that allowed a state, a bureaucracy, a writing system and monumental architecture to appear earlier here than almost anywhere else.

The pharaonic record runs for three thousand years: the pyramids at Giza and Saqqara, the temples of Karnak and Luxor, the rock-cut tombs of the Valley of the Kings, Abu Simbel moved stone by stone to escape the rising water of Lake Nasser.

What follows is just as substantial. Alexandria was the intellectual capital of the Hellenistic world; Coptic Christianity produced its own liturgy, art and monasticism in the Egyptian desert; and after the Islamic conquest, Fustat and then Cairo became one of the great cities of the medieval world. Al-Azhar, founded in 970, remains a centre of Islamic scholarship, and Islamic Cairo holds the densest concentration of medieval Islamic architecture anywhere.

Beyond the valley, the Red Sea coast, the White Desert and Siwa oasis show a country that is far more varied than the postcards suggest.