The history of Egypt

The Nile Valley has been a site of continuous human habitation since at least the
Paleolithic era. Traces of these early peoples appear in the form of artifacts and rock
carvings along the terraces of the Nile and in the desert oases. In the 10th millennium BC,
a grain-grinding culture using the earliest type of sickle blades had been replaced by
another culture of hunter-gatherers and fishers using stone tools. Climate changes and/or
overgrazing around 8000 BC began to desiccate the pastoral lands of Egypt, eventually
forming the Sahara. Early tribal peoples migrated to the Nile River where they developed
a settled agricultural economy and more centralized society.
By about 6000 BC, organized agriculture and large building construction had appeared in
the Nile Valley. During the Neolithic, several predynastic cultures developed
independently in Upper and Lower Egypt. The Badarian culture and the successor
Naqada series are generally regarded as precursors to Dynastic Egyptian civilization. The
earliest known Lower Egyptian site, Merimda, predates the Badarian by about seven
hundred years. Contemporaneous Lower Egyptian communities coexisted with their
southern counterparts for more than two thousand years, remaining somewhat culturally
separate, but maintaining frequent contact through trade. The earliest known evidence of
Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions appear during the predynastic period on Naqada III
pottery vessels, dated to about 3200 BC. A unified kingdom was founded circa 3150 BC
by King Menes, giving rise to a series of dynasties that ruled Egypt for the next three
millennia. Egyptians subsequently referred to their unified country as tAwy, meaning
'Two Lands', the 'Black Land', a reference to the fertile black soil deposited by the Nile
river. Egyptian culture flourished during this long period and remained distinctively
Egyptian in its religion, arts, language and customs. The first two ruling dynasties of a
unified Egypt set the stage for the Old Kingdom period, c.27002200 BC., famous for its
many pyramids, most notably the Third Dynasty pyramid of Djoser and the Fourth
Dynasty Giza Pyramids.
The First Intermediate Period ushered in a time of political upheaval for about 150 years.
Stronger Nile floods and stabilization of government, however, brought back renewed
prosperity for the country in the Middle Kingdom c. 2040 BC, reaching a peak during the
reign of Pharaoh Amenemhat III. A second period of disunity heralded the arrival of the
first alien ruling dynasty in Egypt, that of the Semitic Hyksos. The Hyksos invaders took
over much of Lower Egypt around 1650 BC, and founded a new capital at Avaris. They
were eventually driven out by an Upper Egyptian force led by Ahmose I, who founded
the Eighteenth Dynasty and relocated the capital from Memphis to Thebes.The New
Kingdom (c.15501070 BC) began with the Eighteenth Dynasty, marking the rise of
Egypt as an international power that expanded during its greatest extension to an empire
as far south as Jebel Barkal in Nubia, and included parts of the Levant in the east.

The Thirtieth Dynasty was the last native ruling dynasty during the Pharaonic epoch. It
fell to the Persians in 343 BC after the last native Pharaoh, King Nectanebo II, was
defeated in battle. Later, Egypt fell to the Greeks and Romans, beginning over two
thousand years of foreign rule. Before Egypt became part of the Byzantine realm,
Christianity had been brought by Saint Mark the Evangelist in the AD first century.
Diocletian's reign marks the transition from the Roman to the Byzantine era in Egypt,
when a great number of Egyptian Christians were persecuted. The New Testament was by
then translated into Egyptian, and after the Council of Chalcedon in AD 451, a distinct
Egyptian Coptic Church was firmly established. The Byzantines were able to regain
control of the country after a brief Persian invasion early in the seventh century, until in
AD 639, Egypt was invaded by the Muslim Arabs. The form of Islam the Arabs brought
to Egypt was Sunni, though early in this period Egyptians began to blend their new faith
with indigenous beliefs and practices that had survived through Coptic Christianity,
giving rise to various Sufi orders that have flourished to this day. Muslim rulers
nominated by the Islamic Caliphate remained in control of Egypt for the next six
centuries, including a period for which it was the seat of the Caliphate under the
Fatimids. With the end of the Ayyubid dynasty, a Turco-Circassian military caste, the
Mamluks, took control about AD 1250 and continued to govern even after the conquest
of Egypt by the Ottoman Turks in 1517.The new Egyptian government drafted and
implemented a new constitution in 1923 based on a parliamentary representative system.
Saad Zaghlul was popularly-elected as Prime Minister of Egypt in 1924, and in 1936 the
Anglo-Egyptian Treaty was concluded. However, continued instability in the government
due to remaining British control and increasing involvement by the King in politics led to
the eventual toppling of the monarchy and the dissolution of the parliament through a
coup d'tat by a group of army officers that came to be known as the 1952 Revolution.
They forced King Farouk I to abdicate in support of his son King Ahmed Fouad II.
In 1973, Egypt, along with Syria, launched the October War, a surprise attack against the
Israeli forces occupying the Sinai Peninsula and the Golan Heights in an attempt to
liberate the territory Israel had captured 6 years earlier. Both the US and the USSR
intervened and a cease-fire was reached between both sides. Despite not being a complete
military success, most historians agree that the October War presented Sadat with a
political victory that would later allow him to pursue peace with Israel. In 1977, Sadat
made a historic visit to Israel which led to the 1978 peace treaty in exchange for the
complete Israeli withdrawal from Sinai. Sadat's initiative sparked enormous controversy
in the Arab world and led to Egypt's expulsion from the Arab League, but was supported
by the vast majority of Egyptians. Sadat was assassinated in Cairo by a fundamentalist
military soldier in 1981 and was succeeded by the incumbent Hosni Mubarak. In 2003,
the Egyptian Movement for Change, popularly known as Kifaya, was launched to seek a
return to democracy and greater civil liberties.