History of Egypt

Egypt, one of the world's oldest civilizations, was unified around 3150 BC by King Narmer. It later came under Persian, Greek, Roman, and Islamic rule before joining the Ottoman Empire in 1517. Controlled by Britain in the late 19th century, it became a republic in 1953. After several political transitions, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi currently leads the country.

There is evidence of petroglyphs along the Nile terraces and in desert oases. In the 10th millennium BC, a culture of hunter-gatherers and fishermen was replaced by a grain-grinding culture. Climate changes and/or overgrazing around 6000 BC began to desiccate the pastoral lands of Egypt, forming the Sahara. Early tribal peoples migrated to the Nile River, where they developed a settled agricultural economy and more centralized society.

By about 6000 BC, a Neolithic culture had taken root in the Nile Valley. During the Neolithic era, several predynastic cultures developed independently in Upper and Lower Egypt. The Badari culture and the successor Naqada series are generally regarded as precursors to dynastic Egypt. The earliest known Lower Egyptian site, Merimde, predates the Badarian by about seven hundred years. Contemporaneous Lower Egyptian communities coexisted with their southern counterparts for more than two thousand years, remaining culturally distinct, but maintaining frequent contact through trade. The earliest known evidence of Egyptian hieroglyphic inscriptions appeared during the predynastic period on Naqada III pottery vessels, dated to about 3200 BC.

In Upper Egypt, the predynastic Badari culture was followed by the Naqada culture (Amratian), being closely related to the Lower Nubian; other northeast African populations, with some affinities with other coastal communities from the Maghreb, some tropical African groups, and possibly inhabitants of the Middle East. Upper Egypt is considered to have formed the pre-dominant basis for the cultural development of Pharaonic Egypt and the Proto-dynastic kings emerged from the Naqada region.

Historical scholarship has generally regarded the peopling of the Egyptian Nile Valley from archaeological and biological data, to be the result of interaction between coastal northern Africans, "neolithic" Saharans, Nilotic hunters, and riverine proto-Nubians with some influence and migration from the Levant (Hassan, 1988).

As of 2025, the earliest full-genome analysis of an ancient Egyptian is that of Old Kingdom individual (NUE001) (2855–2570 BCE), with implications for the genetic makeup of Early Dynastic Egyptians in general: the study shows that the genetic profile of this individual was most closely represented by a two-source model, in which 77.6% ± 3.8% of the ancestry corresponded to genomes from the Middle Neolithic Moroccan site of Skhirat-Rouazi (SKH, dated to 4780–4230 BCE), itself consisting of predominantly Levant Neolithic ancestry (76.4 ± 4.0%) and minor Iberomaurusian ancestry (22.4 ± 3.8%), with the remaining (22.4% ± 3.8%) most closely related to known genomes from Neolithic Mesopotamia (dated to 9000-8000 BCE).

A unified kingdom was formed in 3150 BC by King Menes, leading to a series of dynasties that ruled Egypt for the next three millennia. Egyptian culture flourished during this long period and remained distinctively Egyptian in its religion, arts, language and customs.

The first two ruling dynasties of a unified Egypt set the stage for the Old Kingdom period (c. 2700–2200 BC), which constructed many pyramids, most notably the pyramid of Djoser, constructed during the Third Dynasty and the Giza Pyramids, constructed in the Fourth Dynasty.