The roots of Egyptian civilization go back more than 6 000 years to the beginning of settled life along the banks of the Nile River. The country has an unusual geographical and cultural unity that has given the Egyptian people a strong sense of identity and a pride in their heritage as descendants of humankind's earliest civilized community.

Within the long sweep of Egyptian history certain events or epochs have been crucial to the development of Egyptian society and culture. One of these was the unification of Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt sometime in the third millennium B.C. The ancient Egyptians regarded this event as the most important in their history comparable to the "First Time or the creation of the universe. With the unification of the Two Lands" by the legendary if not mythical King Menes the glorious Pharaonic Age began. Power was centralized in the hands of a god-king and thus Egypt became the first organized society.

The ancient Egyptians were the first people of antiquity to believe in life after death. They were the first to build in stone and to fashion the arch in stone and brick. Even before the unification of the Two Lands the Egyptians had developed a plow and a system of writing. They were accomplished sailors and shipbuilders. They learned to chart the heavens in order to predict the Nile flood. Their physicians prescribed healing remedies and performed surgical operations. They sculpted in stone and decorated the walls of their tombs with naturalistic murals in vibrant colors. The legacy of ancient Egypt is written in stone across the face of the country from the pyramids of Upper Egypt to the rock tombs in the Valley of the Kings to the Old Kingdom temples of Luxor and Karnak to the Ptolemaic temples of Edfu and Dendera and to the Roman temple to Isis on Philae Island.

The Arab conquest of 641 by the military commander Amr ibn al As was perhaps the next most important event in Egyptian history because it resulted in the Islamization and Arabization of the country which endure to this day. Even those who clung to the Coptic religion a substantial minority of the population in 1990 were Arabized; that is they adopted the Arabic language and were assimilated into Arab culture.

Although Egypt was formally under Arab rule beginning in the ninth century hereditary autonomous dynasties arose that allowed local rulers to maintain a great deal of control over the country's destiny. During this period Cairo was established as the capital of the country and became a center of religion learning art and architecture. In 1260 the Egyptian ruler Qutuz and his forces stopped the Mongol advance across the Arab world at the battle of Ayn Jalut in Palestine. Because of this victory Islamic civilization could continue to flourish when Baghdad the capital of the Abbasid caliphate fell to the Mongols. Qutuz's successor Baybars I inaugurated the reign of the Mamluks a dynasty of slave-soldiers of Turkish and Circassian origin that lasted for almost three centuries.

In 1517 Egypt was conquered by Sultan Selim I and absorbed into the Ottoman Empire. Since the Turks were Muslims however and the sultans regarded themselves as the preservers of Sunni (see Glossary) Islam this period saw institutional continuity particularly in religion education and the religious law courts. In addition after only a century of Ottoman rule the Mamluk system reasserted itself and Ottoman governors became at times virtual prisoners in the citadel the ancient seat of Egypt's rulers.

The modern history of Egypt is marked by Egyptian attempts to achieve political independence first from the Ottoman Empire and then from the British. In the first half of the nineteenth century Muhammad Ali an Albanian and the Ottoman viceroy in Egypt attempted to create an Egyptian empire that extended to Syria and to remove Egypt from Turkish control. Ultimately he was unsuccessful and true independence from foreign powers would not be achieved until midway through the next century.