History of Egypt
The
history of Egypt is the longest continuous history, as a unified state, of any country in the world. The
Nile valley forms a natural geographic and economic unit, bounded to the east and west by deserts, to the north by the sea and to the south by the
Cataracts of the Nile. The need to have a single authority to manage the waters of the Nile led to the creation of the world's first
state in
Egypt in about
3000 BC. Egypt's peculiar geography made it a difficult country to attack, which is why Pharaonic Egypt was for so long an independent and self-contained state.
Once Egypt did succumb to foreign rule, however, it proved unable to escape from it, and for 2,400 years Egypt was governed by foreigners:
Assyrians,
Persians,
Greeks,
Romans,
Byzantines,
Arabs,
Turks,
French, and
British. (The
Hyksos were among the earliest foreign rulers of Egypt, but the ancient Egyptians regained control of their country after the Hykso period.) When
Gamal Abdel Nasser (
President of Egypt 1954–1970) remarked that he was the first native Egyptian to exercise sovereign power in the country since
Pharaoh Nectanebo II, deposed by the Persians in
343 BC, he was only exaggerating slightly.
In this encyclopedia, Egyptian history has been divided into seven periods:
*
History of ancient Egypt:
3000 BC to
525 BC*
History of Egypt under Achaemenid Persian domination:
525 BC to
332 BC*
Ptolemaic Egypt:
332 BC to
30 BC*
Roman Egypt:
30 BC to AD
639 *
History of early Arab Egypt:
639 to
1517*
History of Ottoman Egypt:
1517 to
1805*
Egypt under Muhammad Ali and his successors:
1805 to
1882*
History of Modern Egypt: since
1882*
Aegyptus*
Ancient Egypt*
Egyptian mythology*
History of Africa*
History of the Middle East*
Pharaoh*
Ancient Egyptian History - A comprehensive & concise educational website focusing on the basic and the advanced in all aspects of Ancient Egypt
*
Modern Egypt Chronology World History Database*
Egypt.. the past and the present*
WWW-VL: History: Ancient Egypt
