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.
Islamic political activism has a lengthy history in Egypt. Several Islamic political groups started soon after World War I ended. The most well-known Islamic political organization is the Muslim Brotherhood (Al Ikhwan al Muslimun, also known as the Brotherhood), founded in 1928 by Hassan al Banna. After World War II, the Muslim Brotherhood acquired a reputation as a radical group prepared to use violence to achieve its religious goals. The group was implicated in several assassinations, including the murder of one prime minister. The Brotherhood had contacts with the Free Officers before the 1952 Revolution and supported most of their initial policies. The Brotherhood, however, soon came into conflict with Gamal Abdel Nasser. The government accused the Brotherhood of complicity in an alleged 1954 plot to assassinate the president and imprisoned many of the group's leaders. In the 1970s, Anwar Sadat amnestied the leaders and permitted them to resume some of their activities. But by that time, the Brotherhood was divided into at least three factions. The more militant faction was committed to a policy of political opposition to the government. A second faction advocated peaceful withdrawal from society and the creation, to the extent possible, of a separate, parallel society based upon Islamic values and law. The dominant moderate group advocated cooperation with the regime.
Egyptian music began its recorded history in the 1910s, at the same time as composers like Sayed Darwish's first mixtures of traditional Egyptian and western musical forms. Since, some of the Arab world's biggest musical stars have been Egyptian, including Mohamed Abdel Wahab, Umm Kulthum, Amr Diab, Mohamed Al-Qasabji and Zakariyya Ahmad. Kulthum was especially popular, and is considered the most successful Egyptian recording artist in history. Most of these stars, including Kalthum, sang Arab classical music. Some, like Abd el-Halim Hafez, were associated with the nationalist revolution in 1952
Egypt is the most populous country in the Arab world and the second-most populous on the African Continent. Nearly 100% of the country's 76 million people live in Cairo and Alexandria; elsewhere on the banks of the Nile; in the Nile delta, which fans out north of Cairo; and along the Suez Canal. These regions are among the world's most densely populated, containing an average of over 3,820 persons per square mile (1,540 per sq. km.), as compared to 181 persons per sq. mi. for the country as a whole.
The Egyptians were one of the first major civilizations to codify design elements in art. The wall paintings done in the service of the Pharaohs followed a rigid code of visual rules and meanings. Early Egyptian art is characterized by absence of linear perspective, which results in a seemingly flat space. These artists tended to create images based on what they knew, and not as much on what they see. Objects in these artworks generally do not decrease in size as they increase in distance and there is little shading to indicate depth. Sometimes, distance is indicated through the use of tiered space, where more distant objects are drawn higher above the nearby objects, but in the same scale and with no overlapping of forms. People and objects are almost always drawn in profile.
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.
In the late 1970s Egypt had several cohabitation governments which proved to be unstable, due to the struggle arising between the President and the Prime Minister. However, since 1981, the National Democratic Party has maintained a majority in the People’s Assembly and supplied the Egyptian President.
The Book of the Dead was a series of almost two hundred magical texts, songs and pictures written on papyrus, which were buried along with the dead in order to ease their passage into the underworld. In some tombs, the Book of the Dead has also been found painted on the walls. One of the best examples of the Book of the Dead is "The Papyrus of Ani", created around 1240 BC. In addition to the texts themselves, it also contains many pictures of Ani and his wife on their journey through the land of the dead.
As of 1990, Egyptian Islam was a complex and diverse religion. Although Muslims agreed on the faith's basic tenets, the country's various social groups and classes applied Islam differently in their daily lives. The literate theologians of Al-Azhar University generally rejected the version of Islam practiced by illiterate religious preachers and peasants in the countryside. Most upper- and middle-class Muslims believed either that religious expression was a private matter for each individual or that Islam should play a more dominant role in public life. Islamic religious revival movements, whose appeal cut across class lines, were present in most cities and in many villages.
Under comprehensive economic reforms initiated in 1991, Egypt has relaxed many price controls, reduced subsidies, and partially liberalized trade and investment. Manufacturing is still dominated by the public sector, which controls virtually all heavy industry. A process of public sector reform and privatization has begun, however, which could enhance opportunities for the private sector. Agriculture, mainly in private hands, has been largely deregulated, with the exception of cotton and sugar production. Construction, non-financial services, and domestic marketing are largely private. This has promoted a steady increase of GNP and the annual growth rate. Among Arab countries, Egypt's GDP is second only to Saudi Arabia's. However, the Egyptian economy relies heavily on tourist revenues. The tourism sector suffered tremendously following a terrorist attack on tourists in Luxor in October 1997, and the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks against the United States, affecting the economy as a whole.
The "Koiné" dialect of the Greek language was important in Hellenistic Alexandria, and was used in the philosophy and science of that culture, and was also studied by later Arabic scholars.
Covering an area of about 1,020,000 km² Egypt includes the Sinai Peninsula (considered part of Southwest Asia), whilst the majority of the country is located in North Africa. It shares land borders with Libya to the west, Sudan to the south, Israel to the North East. It is bordered to the North and East by the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, respectively.
The Theological college of the catechetical school of Alexandria was re-established in 1893. The new school currently has campuses in Alexandria, Cairo, New Jersey, and Los Angeles, where Coptic priests-to-be and other qualified men and women are taught among other subjects Christian theology, history, Coptic language and art - including chanting, music, iconography, and tapestry.
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".
Ethnic minorities include a small number of Bedouin Arab nomads in the Sinai and eastern and western deserts, as well as some Nubians clustered along the Nile in Upper (southern) Egypt who are estimated for about 0.8% of the population.