1.
Egypt
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Egypt, officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a transcontinental country spanning the northeast corner of Africa and southwest corner of Asia by a land bridge formed by the Sinai Peninsula. Egypt is a Mediterranean country bordered by the Gaza Strip and Israel to the northeast, the Gulf of Aqaba to the east, the Red Sea to the east and south, Sudan to the south, and Libya to the west. Across the Gulf of Aqaba lies Jordan, and across from the Sinai Peninsula lies Saudi Arabia, although Jordan and it is the worlds only contiguous Afrasian nation. Egypt has among the longest histories of any country, emerging as one of the worlds first nation states in the tenth millennium BC. Considered a cradle of civilisation, Ancient Egypt experienced some of the earliest developments of writing, agriculture, urbanisation, organised religion and central government. One of the earliest centres of Christianity, Egypt was Islamised in the century and remains a predominantly Muslim country. With over 92 million inhabitants, Egypt is the most populous country in North Africa and the Arab world, the third-most populous in Africa, and the fifteenth-most populous in the world. The great majority of its people live near the banks of the Nile River, an area of about 40,000 square kilometres, the large regions of the Sahara desert, which constitute most of Egypts territory, are sparsely inhabited. About half of Egypts residents live in areas, with most spread across the densely populated centres of greater Cairo, Alexandria. Modern Egypt is considered to be a regional and middle power, with significant cultural, political, and military influence in North Africa, the Middle East and the Muslim world. Egypts economy is one of the largest and most diversified in the Middle East, Egypt is a member of the United Nations, Non-Aligned Movement, Arab League, African Union, and Organisation of Islamic Cooperation. Miṣr is the Classical Quranic Arabic and modern name of Egypt. The name is of Semitic origin, directly cognate with other Semitic words for Egypt such as the Hebrew מִצְרַיִם, the oldest attestation of this name for Egypt is the Akkadian
2.
Faiyum
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Faiyum is a city in Middle Egypt. Located 100 kilometres southwest of Cairo, in the Faiyum Oasis, originally called Shedet in Ancient Egypt, the Greeks called it Crocodilopolis or Krocodilopolis, the Romans Arsinoë. It is one of Egypts oldest cities due to its strategic location and its name in English is also spelled as Fayum, Faiyum or El Faiyūm. Faiyum was previously officially named Madīnet El Faiyūm, the name Faiyum may also refer to the Faiyum Oasis, although it is commonly used by Egyptians today to refer to the city. Archaeological evidence has found occupations around the Fayum dating back to at least the Epipalaeolithic period, recently the area has been further investigated by a team from the UCLA/RUG/UOA Fayum Project. In the Pharaonic era, the city now called Medinet el Fayum was called Shedet and it was the most significant centre of the cult of Sobek, the crocodile-god. In consequence, the Greeks named it Crocodilopolis, Crocodile City, the city worshipped a tamed sacred crocodile, named Petsuchos, that was adorned with gold and gem pendants. The crocodile lived in a temple pond and was fed by the priests with food provided by visitors. When the Petsuchos died, it was replaced by another, under the Ptolemies, the city was for a while called Ptolemais Euergetis. Ptolemy II Philadelphus rechristened the city Arsinoë and the whole nome after the name of his sister and wife Arsinoë, under the Roman Empire, Arsinoe became part of the province of Arcadia Aegypti. To distinguish it from other cities of the name, it was called Arsinoë in Arcadia. With the arrival of Christianity, Arsinoe became the seat of a bishopric, a suffragan of the Oxyrhynchus, the capital of the province, lequien gives the names of several bishops of Arsinoe, nearly all of them associated with one heresy or another. The Catholic Church, considering Arsinoë in Arcadia to be no longer a residential bishopric, Faiyum has several large bazaars, mosques, baths and a much-frequented weekly market. The canal called Bahr Yussef runs through the city, its banks lined with houses, mounds north of the city mark the site of Arsinoe, known to the ancient Greeks as Crocodilopolis, where in ancient times the sacred crocodile kept in Lake Moeris was worshipped. The center of the city is on the canal, with four waterwheels that were adopted by the governorate of Fayoum as its symbol, their chariots, Faiyum is the source of some famous death masks or mummy portraits painted during the Roman occupation of the area. The Egyptians continued their practice of burying their dead, despite the Roman preference for cremation, while under the control of the Roman Empire, Egyptian death masks were painted on wood in a pigmented wax technique called encaustic—the Faiyum mummy portraits represent this technique. Modern Studies conclude that the Faiyum portraits represent Greek settlers in Egypt, victor J. Katz notes that most modern studies conclude that the Greek & Egyptian communities coexisted with little mutual influence. Anthony Lowsted has written extensively on the scope of Apartheid that separated the 2 communities during the Hellenistic and it is a UNESCO World Heritage Site
3.
Cairo
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Cairo is the capital and largest city of Egypt. Cairo has long been a center of the political and cultural life. Cairo has the oldest and largest film and music industries in the Arab world, as well as the worlds second-oldest institution of higher learning, Al-Azhar University. Many international media, businesses, and organizations have regional headquarters in the city, with a population of 6.76 million spread over 453 square kilometers, Cairo is by far the largest city in Egypt. An additional 9.5 million inhabitants live in proximity to the city. Cairo, like many other mega-cities, suffers from high levels of pollution, Cairos metro, one of only two in Africa, ranks among the fifteen busiest in the world, with over 1 billion annual passenger rides. The economy of Cairo was ranked first in the Middle East in 2005, Egyptians often refer to Cairo as Maṣr, the Egyptian Arabic name for Egypt itself, emphasizing the citys importance for the country. In Coptic the city is known as Kahire, meaning Place of the Sun, possibly referring to the ancient city of Heliopolis, the location of the ancient city is the suburb of Ain Shams. The ancient Egyptian name for the area is thought to be Khere-Ohe, The Place of Combat, sometimes the city is informally referred to as Kayro. The area around present-day Cairo, especially Memphis, had long been a point of Ancient Egypt due to its strategic location just upstream from the Nile Delta. However, the origins of the city are generally traced back to a series of settlements in the first millennium. Around the turn of the 4th century, as Memphis was continuing to decline in importance and this fortress, known as Babylon, remained the nucleus of the Roman, and, later, the Byzantine, city and is the oldest structure in the city today. It is also situated at the nucleus of the Coptic Orthodox community, many of Cairos oldest Coptic churches, including the Hanging Church, are located along the fortress walls in a section of the city known as Coptic Cairo. Following the Muslim conquest in 640 AD the conqueror Amr ibn As settled to the north of the Babylon in an area became known as al-Fustat. Originally a tented camp Fustat became a permanent settlement and the first capital of Islamic Egypt, in 750, following the overthrow of the Ummayad caliphate by the Abbasids, the new rulers created their own settlement to the northeast of Fustat which became their capital. This was known as al-Askar as it was laid out like a military camp, a rebellion in 869 by Ahmad ibn Tulun led to the abandonment of Al Askar and the building of another settlement, which became the seat of government. This was al-Qattai, to the north of Fustat and closer to the river, Al Qattai was centred around a palace and ceremonial mosque, now known as the Mosque of ibn Tulun. In 905 the Abbasids re-asserted control of the country and their returned to Fustat
4.
Egyptian hieroglyphs
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Egyptian hieroglyphs were the formal writing system used in Ancient Egypt. It combined logographic, syllabic and alphabetic elements, with a total of some 1,000 distinct characters, cursive hieroglyphs were used for religious literature on papyrus and wood. The later hieratic and demotic Egyptian scripts are derived from hieroglyphic writing, the writing system continued to be used throughout the Late Period, as well as the Persian and Ptolemaic periods. Late survivals of hieroglyphic use are found well into the Roman period, with the closing of pagan temples in the 5th century, knowledge of hieroglyphic writing was lost, and the script remained undeciphered throughout the medieval and early modern period. The decipherment of hieroglyphs would only be solved in the 1820s by Jean-François Champollion, the word hieroglyph comes from the Greek adjective ἱερογλυφικός, a compound of ἱερός and γλύφω, supposedly a calque of an Egyptian phrase mdw·w-nṯr gods words. The glyphs themselves were called τὰ ἱερογλυφικὰ γράμματα the sacred engraved letters, the word hieroglyph has become a noun in English, standing for an individual hieroglyphic character. As used in the sentence, the word hieroglyphic is an adjective. Hieroglyphs emerged from the artistic traditions of Egypt. For example, symbols on Gerzean pottery from c.4000 BC have been argued to resemble hieroglyphic writing, proto-hieroglyphic symbol systems develop in the second half of the 4th millennium BC, such as the clay labels of a Predynastic ruler called Scorpion I recovered at Abydos in 1998. The first full sentence written in hieroglyphs so far discovered was found on a seal found in the tomb of Seth-Peribsen at Umm el-Qaab. There are around 800 hieroglyphs dating back to the Old Kingdom, Middle Kingdom, by the Greco-Roman period, there are more than 5,000. However, given the lack of evidence, no definitive determination has been made as to the origin of hieroglyphics in ancient Egypt. Since the 1990s, and discoveries such as the Abydos glyphs, as writing developed and became more widespread among the Egyptian people, simplified glyph forms developed, resulting in the hieratic and demotic scripts. These variants were more suited than hieroglyphs for use on papyrus. Hieroglyphic writing was not, however, eclipsed, but existed alongside the other forms, especially in monumental, the Rosetta Stone contains three parallel scripts – hieroglyphic, demotic, and Greek. Hieroglyphs continued to be used under Persian rule, and after Alexander the Greats conquest of Egypt, during the ensuing Ptolemaic and Roman periods. It appears that the quality of comments from Greek and Roman writers about hieroglyphs came about, at least in part. Some believed that hieroglyphs may have functioned as a way to distinguish true Egyptians from some of the foreign conquerors, another reason may be the refusal to tackle a foreign culture on its own terms, which characterized Greco-Roman approaches to Egyptian culture generally
5.
Nile
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The Nile is a major north-flowing river in northeastern Africa. It is generally regarded as the longest river in the world, in particular, the Nile is the primary water source of Egypt and Sudan. The Nile has two tributaries, the White Nile and Blue Nile. The White Nile is considered to be the headwaters and primary stream of the Nile itself, the Blue Nile, however, is the source of most of the water and silt. The White Nile is longer and rises in the Great Lakes region of central Africa and it flows north through Tanzania, Lake Victoria, Uganda and South Sudan. The Blue Nile begins at Lake Tana in Ethiopia and flows into Sudan from the southeast, the two rivers meet just north of the Sudanese capital of Khartoum. The northern section of the river flows north almost entirely through the Sudanese desert to Egypt, then ends in a large delta, Egyptian civilization and Sudanese kingdoms have depended on the river since ancient times. Most of the population and cities of Egypt lie along those parts of the Nile valley north of Aswan, in the ancient Egyptian language, the Nile is called Ḥpī or Iteru, meaning river. In Coptic, the words piaro or phiaro meaning the river come from the ancient name. The English name Nile and the Arabic names en-Nîl and an-Nîl both derive from the Latin Nilus and the Ancient Greek Νεῖλος, beyond that, however, the etymology is disputed. One possible etymology derives it from a Semitic Nahal, meaning river, the standard English names White Nile and Blue Nile, to refer to the rivers source, derive from Arabic names formerly applied only to the Sudanese stretches which meet at Khartoum. Above Khartoum, the Nile is also known as the White Nile, at Khartoum the river is joined by the Blue Nile. The White Nile starts in equatorial East Africa, and the Blue Nile begins in Ethiopia, both branches are on the western flanks of the East African Rift. The drainage basin of the Nile covers 3,254,555 square kilometers, the source of the Nile is sometimes considered to be Lake Victoria, but the lake has feeder rivers of considerable size. It is either the Ruvyironza, which emerges in Bururi Province, Burundi, or the Nyabarongo, the two feeder rivers meet near Rusumo Falls on the Rwanda-Tanzania border. Gish Abay is reportedly the place where the water of the first drops of the Blue Nile develop. The Nile leaves Lake Nyanza at Ripon Falls near Jinja, Uganda and it flows north for some 130 kilometers, to Lake Kyoga. For the remaining part it flows westerly through the Murchison Falls until it reaches the very northern shores of Lake Albert where it forms a significant river delta
6.
Fayum mummy portraits
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Mummy portraits or Fayum mummy portraits is the modern term given to a type of naturalistic painted portrait on wooden boards attached to Egyptian mummies from the Coptic period. They belong to the tradition of painting, one of the most highly regarded forms of art in the Classical world. In fact, the Fayum portraits are the large body of art from that tradition to have survived. Mummy portraits have been found across Egypt, but are most common in the Faiyum Basin, particularly from Hawara in the Fayum Basin, Faiyum Portraits is generally thought of as a stylistic, rather than a geographic, description. While painted cartonnage mummy cases date back to times, the Faiyum mummy portraits were an innovation dating to the Coptic period at the time of the Roman occupation of Egypt. They date to the Roman period, from the late 1st century BC or the early 1st century AD onwards and it is not clear when their production ended, but recent research suggests the middle of the 3rd century. The portraits covered the faces of bodies that were mummified for burial, extant examples indicate that they were mounted into the bands of cloth that were used to wrap the bodies. Almost all have now been detached from the mummies and they usually depict a single person, showing the head, or head and upper chest, viewed frontally. In terms of tradition, the images clearly derive more from Graeco-Roman traditions than Egyptian ones. Two groups of portraits can be distinguished by technique, one of encaustic paintings, the former are usually of higher quality. About 900 mummy portraits are known at present, the majority were found in the necropoleis of Faiyum. Due to the hot dry Egyptian climate, the paintings are very well preserved. The Italian explorer Pietro della Valle, on a visit to Saqqara-Memphis in 1615, was the first European to discover and he transported some mummies with portraits to Europe, which are now in the Albertinum. Although interest in Ancient Egypt steadily increased after that period, further finds of mummy portraits did not become known before the early 19th century, the provenance of these first new finds is unclear, they may come from Saqqara as well, or perhaps from Thebes. In 1820, the Baron of Minotuli acquired several mummy portraits for a German collector, in 1827, Léon de Laborde brought two portraits, supposedly found in Memphis, to Europe, one of which can today be seen at the Louvre, the other in the British Museum. Ippolito Rosellini, a member of Jean-François Champollions 1828/29 expedition to Egypt and it is so similar to de Labordes specimens that it is thought to be from the same source. During the 1820s, the British Consul General to Egypt, Henry Salt, sent several further portraits to Paris and London. Some of them were long considered portraits of the family of the Theban Archon Pollios Soter, a character known from written sources
7.
Arabic
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Arabic is a Central Semitic language that was first spoken in Iron Age northwestern Arabia and is now the lingua franca of the Arab world. Arabic is also the language of 1.7 billion Muslims. It is one of six languages of the United Nations. The modern written language is derived from the language of the Quran and it is widely taught in schools and universities, and is used to varying degrees in workplaces, government, and the media. The two formal varieties are grouped together as Literary Arabic, which is the language of 26 states. Modern Standard Arabic largely follows the standards of Quranic Arabic. Much of the new vocabulary is used to denote concepts that have arisen in the post-Quranic era, Arabic has influenced many languages around the globe throughout its history. During the Middle Ages, Literary Arabic was a vehicle of culture in Europe, especially in science, mathematics. As a result, many European languages have borrowed many words from it. Many words of Arabic origin are found in ancient languages like Latin. Balkan languages, including Greek, have acquired a significant number of Arabic words through contact with Ottoman Turkish. Arabic has also borrowed words from languages including Greek and Persian in medieval times. Arabic is a Central Semitic language, closely related to the Northwest Semitic languages, the Ancient South Arabian languages, the Semitic languages changed a great deal between Proto-Semitic and the establishment of the Central Semitic languages, particularly in grammar. Innovations of the Central Semitic languages—all maintained in Arabic—include, The conversion of the suffix-conjugated stative formation into a past tense, the conversion of the prefix-conjugated preterite-tense formation into a present tense. The elimination of other prefix-conjugated mood/aspect forms in favor of new moods formed by endings attached to the prefix-conjugation forms, the development of an internal passive. These features are evidence of descent from a hypothetical ancestor. In the southwest, various Central Semitic languages both belonging to and outside of the Ancient South Arabian family were spoken and it is also believed that the ancestors of the Modern South Arabian languages were also spoken in southern Arabia at this time. To the north, in the oases of northern Hijaz, Dadanitic and Taymanitic held some prestige as inscriptional languages, in Najd and parts of western Arabia, a language known to scholars as Thamudic C is attested
8.
Ismailia Governorate
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Ismailia Governorate is one of the Canal Zone governorates of Egypt. Located in the part of the country, its capital is the city of Ismailia. It was named after Ismail Pasha, who as Ottoman Viceroy of Egypt and it is located between the other two Canal governorates, Port Said Governorate, in the Northern part of Egypt and Suez Governorate. According to population estimates from 2015 the majority of residents in the live in rural areas. Out of an estimated 1,178,641 people residing in the governorate,643,778 people live in areas as opposed to only 534,863 in urban areas. Instead this festival has been celebrating its annual events in Ismailia Governorate and it is sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, Ismailia Governorate, The National Cinema Center and other sponsors. The Ismailia Governorate is on the banks of the Suez Canal and its Ismailia Canal extends from the Nile River near Cairo, to the Suez Canal at the city of Ismailia, the Ismailia Canal was built to provide fresh water to workers during the building of the Suez Canal. The Suez Canal Authority headquarters is located in Ismailia, from 1967 to 1970, Ismailia became a war zone and was damaged in the conflict with Israel. There are several official fishing landing sites in Ismailia, one is at Lake Timsah and the other at Bitter Lake. After a successful SIP from 1992-1997, the United Nations expanded the project to include the entire Governorate of Ismailia calling it SGIP and its goal is to work with local partners to improve the communities in Ismailia
9.
Beheira Governorate
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Beheira Governorate is a coastal governorate in Egypt. Located in the part of the country in the Nile Delta. Beheira Governorate enjoys an important strategical place, west of the Rosetta branch of the Nile and it comprises four important highways, namely the Cairo-Alexandria desert road, the Cairo agricultural road, the international road and the circular road. Beheira Governorate is also home to a number of the most important Coptic monasteries in Wadi El Natrun, beheira consists of 13 centers and 14 cities, and contains important industries such as cotton, chemicals, carpets, electricity and fishing. In 2017, Egyptian President Abdel Fattah al-Sissi appointed the first female governor in the history for Beheiras Governorate. According to population estimates from 2015 the majority of residents in the live in rural areas. Out of an estimated 5,804,262 people residing in the governorate,4,674,346 people live in areas as opposed to only 1,129,916 in urban areas
10.
Faiyum Oasis
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The Faiyum Oasis is a depression or basin in the desert immediately to the west of the Nile south of Cairo. The extent of the area is estimated at between 1,270 km² and 1700 km². The basin floor comprises fields watered by a channel of the Nile, the lake was freshwater in prehistory but is today a saltwater lake. It is a source for tilapia and other fish for the local area, differing from typical oases, whose fertility depends on water obtained from springs, the cultivated land in the Faiyum is formed of Nile mud brought down by the Bahr Yussef,24 km in length. Between the beginning of Bahr Yussef at El Lahun to its end at the city of Faiyum, the drainage water flows into Lake Moeris. When the Mediterranean Sea was a hot dry hollow near the end of the Messinian Salinity Crisis in the late Miocene, Faiyum was a dry hollow, and the Nile flowed past it at the bottom of a canyon. After the Mediterranean reflooded at the end of the Miocene, the Nile canyon became an arm of the sea reaching inland further than Aswan, over geological time that sea arm gradually filled with silt and became the Nile valley. Eventually the Nile valley bed silted up high enough to let the Nile in flood overflow into the Faiyum hollow, the lake is first recorded from about 3000 BC, around the time of Menes. However, for the most part it would only be filled with flood waters. The lake was bordered by settlements, and the town of Crocodilopolis grew up on the south where the higher ground created a ridge. In 2300 BC, the waterway from the Nile to the lake was widened and deepened to make a canal which is now known as the Bahr Yussef. This canal fed into the lake and this was meant to serve three purposes, control the flooding of the Nile, regulate the water level of the Nile during dry seasons, and serve the surrounding area with irrigation. There is evidence of ancient Egyptian pharaohs of the twelfth dynasty using the lake of Faiyum as a reservoir to store surpluses of water for use during the dry periods. The lake was abandoned due to the nearest branch of the Nile dwindling in size from 230 BC. Faiyum was known to the ancient Egyptians as the twenty-first nome of Upper Egypt, in ancient Egyptian times, its capital was Sh-d-y-t, called by the Greeks Crocodilopolis, and refounded by Ptolemy II as Arsinoe. Faiyum became one of the breadbaskets of the Roman world, the Egyptians continued their practice of burying their dead, despite the Roman preference for cremation. Preserved by the dry environment, these Faiyum portraits make up the richest body of portraiture to have survived from antiquity. They provide us with a window into a society of peoples of mixed origins —Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Syrians, Libyans
11.
Lake Moeris
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Lake Moeris is an ancient lake in the northwest of the Faiyum Oasis,80 km southwest of Cairo, Egypt. In prehistory, it was a lake, with an area estimated to vary between 1,270 km² and 1,700 km². It persists today as a saltwater lake called Birket Qarun. The lakes surface is 43 m below sea-level, and covers about 202 square kilometres and it is a source for tilapia and other fish from the local area. The prehistoric mammal Moeritherium was found in this area, when the Mediterranean Sea was a hot dry hollow near the end of the Messinian Salinity Crisis in the late Miocene, Faiyum was a dry hollow, and the Nile flowed past it at the bottom of a canyon. After the Mediterranean reflooded at the end of the Miocene, the Nile canyon became an arm of the sea reaching inland further than Aswan, over geological time that sea arm gradually filled with silt and became the Nile valley. Eventually, the Nile valley bed silted up high enough to let the Nile in flood overflow into the Faiyum hollow, the lake is first recorded from about 3000 BC, around the time of Menes. However, for the most part it would only be filled with flood waters. The lake was bordered by settlements, and the town of Shedet grew up on the south where the higher ground created a ridge. In 2300 BC, the waterway from the Nile to the lake was widened and deepened to make a canal which is now known as the Bahr Yussef. This project was started by Amenemhat III, or perhaps by his father Senusret III and this canal fed into the lake. This was meant to serve three purposes, control the flooding of the Nile, regulate the level of the Nile during dry seasons. There is evidence of ancient Egyptian pharaohs of the twelfth dynasty using the lake of Faiyum as a reservoir to store surpluses of water for use during the dry periods. The lake was abandoned due to the nearest branch of the Nile shrinking from 230 BC. The name Moeris is a Greek version from Egyptian mer-wer ‘great canal’, Amenemhat III, who started this project was also known as Moeris. In ancient Egypt, the lake was also variously called ‘the lake’, ‘pure lake’, during the Middle Kingdom, the whole area around the lake was often referred to as mer-wer as well. Similarly, the Late Egyptian word Piom ‘sea’, originally restricted to Lake Moeris, came to be used to refer to the city of Crocodilopolis, Bahr Yussef Faiyum Faiyum Governorate Faiyum Oasis Moeritherium - an ancient relative of elephants whose fossils were found in the region
Egypt
"Fayum". Encyclopædia Britannica. 10 (11th ed.). 1911. p. 219.
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