Wikimedia Commons / CC-BY-SA-3.0 / GFDL
Capital: Cairo
Population: 105 million+
Language: Egyptian Arabic
1 – Pyramids at Giza (above)
The Pyramids at Giza, raised on a desert plateau at the edge of Cairo around 4,500 years ago as tombs for the pharaohs Khufu, Khafre and Menkaure, are the oldest of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World and the only one to survive.
Khufu’s Great Pyramid was built from an estimated 2.3 million blocks by organised crews of Egyptian labourers, not slaves, fed and housed in a town nearby, and it once gleamed under a casing of fine white limestone.
The Great Pyramid is generally held to have been the tallest structure on Earth for about 3,800 years, until the spire of Lincoln Cathedral passed it around 1311, and in November 1943 Roosevelt, Churchill and Chiang Kai-shek met near the pyramids for the Cairo Conference.
2 – Sphinx
The Great Sphinx, a lion with a pharaoh’s head that most scholars attribute to Khafre, was carved from the bedrock beside the pyramids around 4,500 years ago, and Guinness World Records lists it as the largest sculpture carved from a single piece of stone.
At about 73 m long and 20 m high, the Sphinx spent much of its history buried up to the neck in sand, and between its paws stands the Dream Stele of Thutmose IV, who claimed it had promised him the throne if he cleared it.
Contrary to legend, Napoleon’s soldiers did not shoot off its nose, since Frederic Norden drew it noseless in 1737, and the historian al-Maqrizi blamed a Sufi who defaced it in 1378, though some archaeologists think the damage is older.
3 – Luxor – Valley of the Kings
The Valley of the Kings, in the desert hills on the west bank of the Nile opposite Luxor, ancient Thebes, was the burial ground of the New Kingdom pharaohs, who cut more than 60 tombs into the rock over nearly 500 years.
Their walls blaze with painted scenes of gods and the afterlife, and the most famous tomb, Tutankhamun’s, found by Howard Carter in 1922 with more than 5,000 objects, was the only royal tomb in the Valley found almost intact.
When Carter’s patron Lord Carnarvon died in April 1923 from an infected mosquito bite, the press seized on a “curse of the pharaohs”, a legend that has haunted mummy films and stories ever since.
4 – Abu Simbel
Abu Simbel’s two temples, carved into a Nubian cliff near the Sudanese border by Ramesses II in the 13th century BC, the greater one fronted by four seated colossi of the pharaoh about 20 m high, were built to awe travellers from the south.
In the 1960s, as Lake Nasser rose behind the new Aswan High Dam, the temples were cut into more than 1,000 blocks and rebuilt about 65 m higher in a UNESCO-led international rescue.
The Great Temple is aligned so that around 22 February and 22 October the rising sun reaches deep into the mountain to light the statues in its innermost sanctuary, leaving only Ptah, the creator god linked with the underworld, in shadow.
5 – Karnak
Karnak, on the east bank of the Nile at Luxor, is one of the largest religious complexes ever built, a sacred city of temples, gateways and obelisks dedicated above all to Amun-Ra and built up over some 2,000 years.
Its showpiece is the Great Hypostyle Hall, a forest of 134 stone columns, the central 12 rising about 21 m, while elsewhere stand obelisks, a sacred lake and the start of the 2.7 km Avenue of Sphinxes, which runs to Luxor Temple.
Karnak was not the work of one king, as nearly every major pharaoh over two millennia added to it, so its stones read like an open-air history book of ancient Egypt.
6 – Philae
Philae, on an island in the Nile near Aswan, is the graceful temple of Isis, goddess of magic and healing, and drew pilgrims from Egypt, Nubia and the Greek world.
Wander its pylons, colonnades and the riverside Kiosk of Trajan, all dismantled and rebuilt on higher Agilkia Island in a UNESCO-backed rescue that reopened the temple in 1980.
Philae was one of the last strongholds of the old Egyptian religion, and here on 24 August 394 AD the priest Esmet-Akhom carved the last known dated hieroglyphic inscription, closing a tradition of more than 3,000 years.
7 – Saqqara
Saqqara, south of Cairo, was the vast city of the dead for ancient Memphis for some 3,000 years and holds the Step Pyramid of Djoser, built around 2650 BC and often described as the world’s oldest large-scale cut-stone building.
Rising in six tiers, it was Egypt’s first pyramid and the prototype for those at Giza, and around it spread lesser pyramids, painted tombs of nobles and the Serapeum, where sacred Apis bulls were buried in massive stone sarcophagi.
The pyramid’s architect, Imhotep, a non-royal official, was so revered that some 2,000 years after his death he was worshipped as a god of medicine, an honour almost unheard of outside the royal family.
8 – River Nile
The River Nile, usually ranked the world’s longest river at about 6,650 km, flows from the heart of Africa north to the Mediterranean, and without it there would be no Egypt.
Every summer its flood once spread black silt across the valley, giving Egypt its ancient name, Kemet, the Black Land, until the Aswan High Dam ended it in 1970, and the river can be explored by felucca or cruise ship between Luxor and Aswan.
Herodotus called Egypt “the gift of the river”, and around 95% of Egyptians live in the Nile Valley and Delta, on about 4% of the country’s land.
9 – Mount Sinai
Mount Sinai (Jabal Musa), about 2,285 m high in the Sinai Peninsula, is traditionally identified as the mountain where Moses received the Ten Commandments and is revered by Jews, Christians and Muslims.
At its foot stands St Catherine’s Monastery, founded by Emperor Justinian in the mid-6th century around what tradition holds is the Burning Bush, and widely regarded as the oldest continuously inhabited Christian monastery, while most visitors climb through the night to see sunrise from the summit.
St Catherine’s library is often said to hold the largest collection of early manuscripts outside the Vatican, and according to tradition the 3,750 Steps of Repentance up Mount Sinai were cut by a single monk as an act of penance.
10 – Alexandria
Alexandria, founded by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, became the capital of Ptolemaic and Roman Egypt and the city of Cleopatra, and in 1801 it surrendered to the Dublin-born General John Hely-Hutchinson, ending a campaign that won six Irish regiments, among them the Connaught Rangers, the Sphinx badge.
The medieval Qaitbay Citadel stands on the site of the Pharos, the lighthouse that was one of the Seven Wonders, probably over 100 m tall, and in December 1941 Italian frogmen riding human torpedoes crippled the battleships HMS Queen Elizabeth and HMS Valiant in the harbour.
Alexandria’s Great Library set out to collect every book in the world, and according to Galen books found on ships in the harbour were seized and copied, while its scholars included Euclid and Eratosthenes, who measured the Earth’s circumference.
11 – Islamic Cairo
Islamic Cairo, between Saladin’s Citadel and the medieval city gates, was built up over a thousand years by Egypt’s Fatimid, Ayyubid, Mamluk and Ottoman rulers, and has been a UNESCO World Heritage Site since 1979.
The Mosque of Ibn Tulun, completed in 879, is the oldest in Cairo to survive largely in its original form, Al-Azhar, founded in 970–972, is often cited as one of the oldest working universities, and the alabaster Mosque of Muhammad Ali crowns the Citadel.
On 1 March 1811 Muhammad Ali invited the Mamluk beys, who had ruled Egypt as sultans from 1250 to 1517 and remained a powerful elite under the Ottomans, to a banquet at the Citadel, then had hundreds of them cut down in a narrow lane as they rode out.
12 – Siwa Oasis
Siwa Oasis, about 560 km west of Cairo and some 50 km from the Libyan border, is a green bowl of date palms and salt lakes up to about 20 m below sea level, home to the easternmost Berber-speaking community and to an oracle of Amun famed across the Greek world.
The oracle’s temple stands in ruins on the rock at Aghurmi, near the Mountain of the Dead with its painted tombs, palm-shaded springs, salt lakes so dense you float, and the slumped mud towers of Shali.
Alexander the Great crossed the desert to consult the oracle in the winter of 332–331 BC, and the fortress of Shali, built in the early 13th century of kershef, salt-crusted earth and clay, was ruined by three days of rain in 1926.
13 – Suez Canal
The Suez Canal, running 193 km from Port Said to Suez, opened in 1869 after a decade of digging under Ferdinand de Lesseps, cutting thousands of miles off the voyage from Europe to Asia, and left Egypt so deep in debt that Britain bought its shares in 1875 and occupied the country in 1882.
From the Ismailia road ships appear to sail through open desert, Port Said keeps its balconied colonial waterfront at the northern mouth, and in March 2021 the container ship Ever Given, wedged sideways, blocked the canal for six days.
On 26 July 1956 Nasser nationalised the Suez Canal, and Israel invaded, followed by Britain and France, only for them to withdraw under American and Soviet pressure in a crisis often seen as the moment the two old empires ceased to be first-rank powers.
14 – The Grand Egyptian Museum
The Grand Egyptian Museum, about 2 km from the pyramids on the edge of the Giza plateau, opened officially on 1 November 2025 after more than two decades and about a billion dollars, and is described as the world’s largest museum devoted to a single civilisation.
It houses more than 100,000 artefacts in 12 main galleries, with an 83-tonne statue of Ramesses II in the atrium, a grand staircase lined with colossi and views of the pyramids, and Tutankhamun’s treasures, more than 5,000 pieces, shown together for the first time since 1922.
The building was designed by Heneghan Peng, a Dublin practice, which won the 2002–03 international competition from 1,557 entries from more than 80 countries, so the newest monument at Giza, in sight of the oldest, was drawn up in Ireland.
15 – El Alamein
El Alamein, on the Mediterranean coast about 100 km west of Alexandria, gave its name to the battle of 23 October to 4 November 1942 in which Montgomery’s Eighth Army defeated Rommel’s Panzerarmee Afrika and ended the Axis threat to Egypt and the Suez Canal.
The Commonwealth War Cemetery holds 7,342 burials and the Alamein Memorial names 11,866 men with no known grave, while along the coast road stand a war museum, the castle-like German memorial and the Italian memorial designed by Paolo Caccia Dominioni, who had fought in the desert.
Churchill wrote that “before Alamein we never had a victory”, and the victory had strong Irish ties, as Montgomery’s family home was at Moville, County Donegal, and his commander-in-chief, Harold Alexander, came from the Caledon family of County Tyrone and served in the Irish Guards.