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The permanent headquarters for the League of Arab States is located in Cairo. Egypt was the first Arab state to establish peace with the State of Israel after the signing of the Israel-Egypt Peace Treaty after the Camp David Accords

The literacy rate is about 55% of the adult population. Education is free through university and compulsory from ages six through 15. Rates for primary and secondary education have strengthened in recent years. Ninety-three percent of children enter primary school and about one-quarter drop out after the sixth year; in 1994-95, 87% entered primary school and about half dropped out after the sixth year. There are 20,000 primary and secondary schools with some 10 million students, 13 major universities with more than 500,000 students, and 67 teacher colleges. Major universities include Cairo University (100,000 students), Alexandria University, and the 1,000-year-old Al-Azhar University, one of the world's major centers of Islamic learning.

The capital city, Cairo, is Africa's largest city and has been renowned for centuries as a center of learning, culture and commerce of Egypt.

Egypt played an important role in the negotiations leading to the Madrid Peace Conference in 1991, which, under United States and Russian sponsorship, brought together all parties in the region to discuss Middle East peace. This support has continued to the present, with President Hosni Mubarak often intervening personally to promote peace negotiations. In 1996, he hosted the Sharm El-Sheikh "Summit of the Peacemakers" attended by President Bill Clinton and other world leaders. In 2000, he hosted two summits at Sharm El-Sheikh and one at Taba in an effort to resume the Camp David negotiations suspended in July of 2000, and in June 2003, Mubarak hosted President George W. Bush for another summit on Middle East peace process.

In modern times, archaeology and the study of Egypt's ancient heritage as the field of Egyptology has itself become a major scientific pursuit in the country. Led at first by Westerners, this modern rediscovery has in recent decades been taken up by Egyptian archeaologists such as Zahi Hawass and the Supreme Council of Antiquities he leads. None of this could have taken place, though, without the discovery of the Rosetta Stone, a tablet written in ancient Greek, Egyptian demotic script, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Greek, a well known language, gave linguists the ability to decipher the mysterious Egyptian hieroglyphic language. The ability to decipher hieroglyphics facilitated the translation of hundreds of the texts and inscriptions that were previously indecipherable, giving us insight into Egyptian culture that would have otherwise been lost to the ages. The stone was discovered on July 15, 1799 in the port town of Rosetta, Egypt,and has been held in the British Museum since 1802.

A summit was convened in Sharm El Sheik in early 2005, which was attended by Egypt, Israel, the Palestinian Authority and Jordan. The Egyptian Chief of Intelligence, General Omar Suleiman, has played a substantial role in negotiations between the Israeli and Palestinian sides and is highly respected on both sides.

Coptic Christianity became popular in the Roman and Byzantine periods, and Egypt was indeed one of the strongest early Christian communities. Today, Christians constitute about 10% of the population.

Egyptian music is a rich mixture of indigenous, Arabic, African and Western influences.

The Culture of Egypt has five thousand years of recorded history. Ancient Egypt was among the earliest civilizations. For millennia, Egypt maintained a strikingly complex and stable culture that had a profound influence on later cultures of Europe, the Middle East and Africa. After the Pharaonic era, Egypt itself came under the influence of Hellenism, for a time Christianity, and later, Arab and Islamic culture. Today, many aspects of Egypt's ancient culture exist in interaction with newer elements, including the influence of modern Western culture, itself with roots in Ancient

The Egyptians are a fairly homogeneous people. Mediterranean and Arab influences appear in the north, and there is some mixing in the south with the Nubians of northern Sudan. Many theories has been proposed on the origins of the Egyptians, however non are conclusive, and the most widely accepted theory is that Egyptian society was the result of a mix of east african and asiatic people who moved to the Nile Valley after the ice age. The bulk of Modern Egyptian society still maintains a homogenous genetic tie to the ancient Egyptian society which has always been regarded as rural and most populous compared to the neighboring demographics. The Egyptian people spoke only languages from the Afro-Asiatic family (previously known as Hamito-semitic) throughout their history starting with Old Egyptian, to modern Arabic.

Though considered a low-income country, Egypt has a thriving media and arts industry, with more than 30 satellite channels and more than 100 motion pictures produced a year. To bolster its media industry, especially with the keen competition from the Persian Gulf states and Lebanon, it has built a large media city that it has promoted as the "Hollywood of the East". Egypt has the only opera house amongst Arab countries.