At dawn on the Nile Delta, the river lies dark beneath Cairo's first traffic, and yet this place has been making history for millennia. Along the Nile Valley and Delta, people were carving rock, grinding grain, and settling the land by about 6000 BCE, while the earliest hieroglyphic inscriptions appeared on Naqada III pottery around 3200 BCE. Ancient Egypt, with its black floodplain soil and red desert beyond, became one of civilisation's first great laboratories for writing, agriculture, urban life, organised religion, and central government.

Around c. 3150 BCE, King Menes unified Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt into The Two Lands, beginning a succession of dynasties that lasted three millennia. The Old Kingdom raised the pyramids at Giza, the Middle Kingdom restored stability under rulers such as Amenemhat III, and the New Kingdom under Ahmose I pushed Egyptian power into Nubia and the Levant. Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, and Ramesses II all belonged to that long imperial flowering.

Egypt's fortunes turned repeatedly. Cambyses II of Persia conquered it in 525 BCE, Alexander the Great took it in 332 BCE, and Ptolemy I Soter made Alexandria the capital of a Hellenistic kingdom famed for trade and learning. Cleopatra VII's suicide after Octavian captured Alexandria ended the last dynasty. Under Rome, Egypt became a wealthy imperial province, and Christianity arrived in the 1st century through Saint Mark the Evangelist, before the Coptic Church was firmly established by 451 CE.

In 639 to 642, Arab Muslim armies under Amr ibn al-As conquered Egypt, bringing Islam and founding Fustat, later eclipsed by Cairo in 969. The Fatimids made Cairo their capital in the tenth century, the Mamluks ruled after 1250, and the Ottomans took Egypt in 1517. Then came Muhammad Ali Pasha, who seized power in 1805, massacred the remaining Mamluks, built a modern army, expanded cotton production, and pushed Egyptian control into Sudan, Syria, Arabia, and Anatolia before European intervention clipped his conquests in 1841.

By 1867 Egypt had become an autonomous vassal state, and the Suez Canal opened in 1869 as a glittering strategic prize. Debt and foreign pressure followed, Britain occupied Egypt in 1882, and the country finally gained independence as a monarchy in 1922. Saad Zaghlul and the Wafd Party drove the nationalist surge, while the 1936 treaty loosened British control. After the 1948, 1956, 1967, and 1973 wars with Israel, the Free Officers led by Muhammad Naguib and Gamal Abdel Nasser abolished the monarchy in 1953 and declared a republic.

Nasser's Egypt nationalised the Suez Canal in 1956, briefly joined Syria in the United Arab Republic from 1958 to 1961, and after the Six-Day War of 1967 imposed an Emergency Law that lasted, with one brief break, until 2012. After Nasser's death in 1970, Anwar Sadat renamed the country the Arab Republic of Egypt in 1971, expelled Soviet advisors in 1972, fought the 1973 war, and signed the Camp David Accords in 1978, trading peace with Israel for the return of Sinai. He was assassinated in 1981.