Travel information for your Egypt Travel
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Egypt Travel Guide
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Travel Guide
Culture
Egypt's capital city, Cairo, is Africa's largest city and has been renowned for centuries as a center of learning, culture and commerce.
Egypt also hosts two major religious institutions. Al-Azhar University, the oldest Islamic institution for higher studies (founded around 970 CE) with its corresponding mosque Al-Azhar. The head of Al-Azhar is traditionally regarded as the supreme leader of Sunni Muslims all over the world. Egypt also has a strong Christian heritage as evidenced by the existence of the Coptic Orthodox Church headed by the Patriarch of Alexandria, which has a following of approximately 50 million Christians worldwide (one of the famous Coptic Orthodox Churches is Saint Takla Haimanot Church in Alexandria http://www.St-Takla.org).
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 each 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 is the only Arab country with an opera house.
Some famous Egyptians include:
* Gamal Abdel Nasser (former president)
* Boutros Boutros-Ghali (former Secretary General of the United Nations)
* Naguib Mahfouz (Nobel Prize-winning novelist)
* Umm Kulthum (singer)
* Omar Sharif (actor)
* Ahmed Zewail (Nobel Prize-winning chemist)
* Mohamed ElBaradei (Head of the International Atomic Energy Agency and Winner of the 2005 Nobel Peace Prize)
* Anwar Sadat (former president and winner of the Nobel Peace Prize)
Demographics
Egypt is the most populous Arab country, at about 77,500,000 people. Nearly all the population is concentrated along the River Nile, notably Alexandria and Cairo, and along the Nile Delta and near the Suez Canal. Approximately 90% of the population adheres to Islam and most of the remainder to Christianity (primarily the Coptic denomination).
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 have been proposed on the origins of the Egyptians; however, none 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 have spoken only languages from the Afro-Asiatic family (previously known as Hamito-Semitic) throughout their history starting with Old Egyptian, to modern Arabic.
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.
Economy
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 like UAE, and Europe. The United States as well has a large population of Egyptian immigrants.
The completion of the Aswan High Dam in 1971 and the resultant Lake Nasser have altered the time-honored place of the Nile River in the agriculture and ecology of Egypt. A rapidly growing population (the largest in the Arab world), limited arable land, and dependence on the Nile all continue to overtax resources and stress society.
The government has struggled to ready the economy for the new millennium through economic reform and massive investment in communications and physical infrastructure, much financed from U.S. foreign aid (since 1979, an average of 2.2 billion dollars per year). Egypt is the third largest recipient of such funds from the United States following the Iraq war. Economic conditions are starting to improve considerably after a period of stagnation due to the adoption of more liberal economic policies by the government, as well as increased revenues from tourism and a booming stock market.
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