Egypt

Egypt is a country in Africa.

Most of Egypt is dry desert. The Nile River runs through it. Green fields grow along the river. The capital city is called Cairo.

Egypt is in the northeastern corner of Africa. The Mediterranean Sea lies to the north and the Red Sea to the east. A triangle of land called the Sinai Peninsula joins Africa to Asia, so a small part of Egypt is in Asia.

Almost all of Egypt is desert, but the Nile River flows through it from south to north, making a narrow green strip of farmland. More than 100 million people live in Egypt, and most of them live along the Nile. The capital, Cairo, is one of the largest cities in the world.

Egypt lies in the northeastern corner of Africa, and the Sinai Peninsula, east of the Suez Canal, links it to Asia. Its area is about 1 million square kilometers (1,010,408 km² in Wikidata; Britannica gives 996,603). Britannica divides it into four physical regions: the Nile valley and delta, the Western Desert, the Eastern Desert and Sinai.

Egypt's statistics agency, CAPMAS, counted 109,540,965 people living in the country on September 19, 2026, by its population clock; other estimates differ (the World Bank gives 118.4 million for 2025), but all are well over 100 million. Most people live along the Nile, where some riverside governorates have more than 2,000 people per square kilometer, and roughly one-third of the population is under 15. Islam is the official religion, and nearly all Egyptian Muslims follow its Sunni branch; Coptic Christians are a long-established minority.

Cairo is the biggest city in Egypt.

It is busy and full of tall buildings. Near Cairo stand the great pyramids. Alexandria is a big city by the sea. Far in the south is Aswan.

Cairo, the capital, stands where the Nile valley opens out into the delta. About 9.8 million people lived in the city in 2023, and many more live in the towns around it. Just across the river, at Giza, stand the great pyramids, built as tombs for ancient kings called pharaohs.

Alexandria, on the Mediterranean coast, was home to an advanced society of readers and writers under Greek rulers more than 2,000 years ago. Upriver, the city of Luxor stands on part of the site of ancient Thebes, with huge temples at Karnak and Luxor and royal tombs cut into the rock of the Valley of the Kings.

Cairo, with 9,801,536 people in 2023 (Wikidata), is one of the world's largest urban agglomerations. Its predecessor capital, Memphis, traditionally said to have been founded in 3000 BCE as the capital of a unified Egypt, was the administrative capital during the Old Kingdom. UNESCO's Memphis and its Necropolis site (1979) includes more than 38 pyramids, among them the three pyramids of Giza and the Great Sphinx; the Great Pyramid of Khufu is the only surviving wonder of the ancient world, and Saqqara's Step Pyramid of Djoser is the first pyramid ever built and the first monumental stone building.

Under the Greek Ptolemaic dynasty, an advanced literate society thrived in Alexandria. Thebes, part of whose site modern Luxor occupies, was Egypt's capital during the Middle and New Kingdoms; with the temples and palaces of Karnak and Luxor and the royal burial grounds of the Valley of the Kings and the Valley of the Queens, UNESCO calls it a striking testimony to Egyptian civilization at its height.

The Nile is a very long river.

It brings water to the dry land. Plants grow along its banks. All around is hot, dry desert. In some places there are rocky mountains.

The Nile flows about 1,200 kilometers north through Egypt, cutting a narrow green valley through bare desert. North of Cairo it spreads out into a wide, flat delta crossed by canals before it reaches the Mediterranean Sea. The Aswan High Dam, finished in 1970, holds back its water in a huge reservoir called Lake Nasser.

West of the Nile is the Western Desert, a branch of the Libyan Desert. East of the river is the Eastern Desert, with rugged mountains near the Red Sea. Egypt is very sunny, with about 12 hours of sunshine a day in summer, and in spring hot, dusty winds called khamsins can blow.

For about 1,200 km the Nile cuts through bare desert in a trenchlike valley, the cultivated strip between Cairo and Aswan generally 8 to 16 km wide. At Cairo it fans out into a delta of about 25,000 km², once crossed by as many as seven branches and now by two, the Damietta and Rosetta. Since the Aswan High Dam was completed in 1970, the valley has been under year-round irrigation, and Lake Nasser flooded the Nubian valley, whose 100,000 or so inhabitants were resettled.

Egypt lies in the North African desert belt: low rainfall, a wide seasonal and daily temperature range and year-round sunshine. Mean June midday highs range from 33 °C in Cairo to 41 °C in Aswan. Khamsin dust storms, most frequent from March to June, can raise temperatures by 8 to 11 °C in a short time. In the Western Desert, UNESCO's Wadi Al-Hitan (Whale Valley, 2005) preserves fossils of early whales called archaeocetes in the last stages of losing their hind limbs, showing the transition from land mammals to ocean-going whales.

More than 100 million people live in Egypt.

Most people speak Arabic. Many families live near the Nile. A well-known food is ful, made from beans. People eat it with bread.

More than 100 million people live in Egypt, and most live in the Nile valley and delta. Arabic is the official language. Most people speak a form of everyday Egyptian Arabic, which is very different from the written Arabic learned in school.

People in Egypt live in many ways: farmers called fellahin work the fields of the delta, Nubians live in the far south, and Bedouin communities live in the deserts and Sinai. Ful medames, slowly cooked fava beans with spices, is widely thought of as the national dish and is usually served with bread. Falafel probably began in Egypt.

Arabic is the official language. Spoken Egyptian Arabic differs greatly from Modern Standard Arabic, which is learned in school, and Cairo's dialect is heard through the delta towns while Upper Egypt has its own. Smaller language communities include the Beja of the southern Eastern Desert, speakers of a Berber-related language at Siwa Oasis and Nubians, whose languages belong to the Nilo-Saharan family.

Britannica describes the population of the Nile valley and delta as fairly homogeneous, with the Sa'idi of Upper Egypt, Nubians in the far south and Bedouin groups in Sinai and the deserts, many of them once nomadic herders who are now partly or fully settled. Islam is the official religion; the Coptic Orthodox Church's rites date from before the Arab conquest of the 7th century. Ful medames (fava beans), mulukhiyyah (a soup of jute leaves), kuftah meatballs and two kinds of bread, aysh baladi and aysh shami, are everyday foods.