Flight From Bristol To Egypt Sources of flight from bristol to egypt resources from the Web

The regularity and richness of the annual Nile River flood, coupled with semi-isolation provided by deserts to the east and west, allowed for the development of one of the world's great civilisations. A unified kingdom arose circa 3200 BC by King Mina, and a series of dynasties ruled in Egypt for the next three millennia. The last native dynasty, known as the Thirtieth Dynasty, fell to the Persians in 341 BC who dug the predecessor of the Suez canal and connected the Red Sea to the Mediterranean. Later, Egypt fell to the Greeks, Romans, Byzantines and Persians again.

Egypt has endured as a unified state for more than 5,000 years, and archeological evidence indicates that a developed Egyptian society has existed for much longer. Egyptians take pride in their pharaonic heritage and in their descent from what many consider mankind's earliest civilization. The Arabic word for Egypt is Misr, which originally connoted "civilization" or "metropolis".

After Mohamed Naguib resigned in 1954, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the real architect of the 1952 Revolution, assumed power as President and nationalized the Suez Canal leading to the 1956 Suez Crisis. Between 1958 and 1961 Egypt and Syria formed a union known as the United Arab Republic.

Egypt's economy depends mainly on agriculture, media, petroleum exports, and tourism; there are also more than 5 million Egyptians working abroad, mainly in Saudi Arabia, the Gulf area, and Europe.

Following the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks on the United States, Egypt, which has itself been the target of terrorist attacks, has been a key supporter of the U.S. war against terrorists and terrorist organizations such as Osama bin Ladin and al-Qaeda, and has supported the Iraqi Governing Council.

After the 1952 Revolution, the government assumed responsibility for appointing officials to mosques and religious schools. The government mandated reform of Al-Azhar University beginning in 1961. These reforms permitted department heads to be drawn from outside the ranks of the traditionally trained orthodox ulama.

The Ancient Egyptian language, which formed a separate branch among the family of Afro-Asiatic languages, was among the first written languages, and is known from hieroglyphic inscriptions preserved on monuments and sheets of papyrus. The Coptic language, the only extant descendant of Egyptian, is today the liturgical language of the Coptic Orthodox Church.

Egypt's largely uneducated urban and rural lower classes were intensely devoted to Islam, but they lacked a thorough knowledge of the religion. Even village religious leaders had only a rudimentary knowledge of Islam. The typical village imam or prayer leader had at most a few years of schooling; his scholarly work was limited to reading prayers and sermons prepared by others and to learning passages from the Qur'an. Popular religion included a variety of unorthodox practices, such as veneration of saints, recourse to charms and amulets, and belief in the influence of evil spirits.

Over the last 20 years, more than 217 oil exploration agreements have been signed and multinational oil companies spent more than $27 billion in exploration companions. These activities let to the findings of about 18 crude oil fields and 16 natural gas fields. As a result of these findings, crude oil reserves as of September 2001 are estimated at 445 million m³ (2.8 billion barrel), and proven natural gas reserves are 1,600 km³ (55 trillion ft³) with a likely additional 1,800 km³ (65 trillion ft³). Texas-based Apache Oil Company is the largest American investor in Egypt, with a total investment of more than $1.6 billion since 1996.

The Egyptian military provides indirect support for the foreign policy of Egypt in the region. Egypt is the strongest military power on the African continent, and the second largest in the Middle East, after Israel.