Modern Egypt

The Arab Republic of Egypt (Gumhūriyyat Miṣr al-ʿArabiyyah) is a republic in northern Africa. The country is mostly desert, except for a thin strip along the Nile, plus a triangular bit (the Delta) where the Nile meets the sea. Egypt is traditionally divided into Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt, with Lower Egypt being the northern part of the country (i.e. the Delta), and Upper Egypt being the parts south. Where Upper Egypt meets Lower is Cairo, the nation's capital, and at 20 million-some inhabitants Africa's largest metropolitan area. The famous Pyramids are also there, and Memphis--the capital of the Old Kingdom--is not too far away, proving that some places are just more strategic than others. Arabic is the official language and the language of the people, but the issue is kind of...complex. For that matter, its history and culture are also rather complex; see History of Modern Egypt for details.

Although Arabic is the major language of Egypt, the majority of Egyptians are not ethnically Arab according to the traditional definition; rather, your average Egyptian descends chiefly from the actual Ancient Egyptians, with at most a small number of ancestors hailing from the Arabian Peninsula. Whether or not Egyptians ought to be considered Arabs anyway is a point of contention. The Coptic Christian minority tends to identify more with Egypt's native ethnic group — Copts — seeing Arabization and Islam as hand-in-hand representations of foreign invaders (they still speak Arabic as a first language, of course, and Coptic only as a liturgical language). The Muslim majority is more divided: while some emphasize a common Arab identity, others prefer an Egyptian one, and still others prefer to identify with the Muslim Ummah (community of believers) as a whole. Many more, perhaps most, see no contradiction between the three.

However, Egypt, by dint of its large population (80 million out of ~200 million Arabic-speakers) and other factors, is widely considered to be the center of Arabic culture today: a very large proportion of Arabic movies, Soap Operas, music and literature come out of Egypt. In fact, the joke in Arab high culture is that Egypt writes, Lebanon publishes, and Iraq reads. The cultural impact of Egypt is--or at least was--great enough to deserve two articles: one on Egyptian Culture, and one on their biggest cultural export, Egyptian Movies.

Egypt is also a largely Muslim country (80% to 90%), and the native Coptic Christian church (a form of Oriental Orthodoxy) provides most of the rest. Despite what you might see in certain media, the numbers of Egyptians still worshiping Ra, Osiris and the others are not thought to be great.

Egypt is still famous mostly as the home of the Pyramids, the Sphinx and lots and lots of temples, to say nothing of the Suez Canal.