Situated in the Northeastern corner of Africa, bounded by the Mediterranean Sea from the North and the Red Sea from the East, with the Sinai Peninsula constituting a link to Southwest Asia, Egypt enjoys a unique, strategic location at the crossroads between Africa, the Middle East and Europe. Throughout its history, Egypt has been a country where various cultures met and interacted. Egypt's total area is over one million square kilometers, yet only a narrow strip in the Nile Valley and the Delta is cultivated land. The Nile, which traverses over 1,000 miles within Egypt, from Wadi Halfa in the South to the Mediterranean in the north, divides the country into four broad regions; the Western Desert which occupies almost two-thirds of the total area, the Eastern Desert, the Sinai Peninsula, and the Nile Valley and Delta, which is the most densely populated region of the country. The vast majority of the remaining land is made up of sparsely inhabited, arid desert. Extensive land reclamation efforts since 1947 have aimed at increasing the area of cultivable land.
Language: Arabic has been the written and spoken language of Egypt. Before the Arab invasion in AD 639, Coptic, the language descended from ancient Egyptian, was the language of both religious and everyday life for the mass of the population; by the 12th century, however, it had been totally replaced by Arabic, continuing only as a liturgical language for the Coptic Orthodox Church. Arabic has become the language of both the Egyptian Christian and Muslim. The written form of the Arabic language, in grammar and syntax, has remained substantially unchanged since the 7th century. In other ways, however, the written language has changed the modern forms of style, word sequence, and phraseology are simpler and more flexible than in classical Arabic and are often directly derivative of English or French.
Religion Egypt is predominantly Muslim, covering about 90% of the population, while Christians represent about 10% (official figures put it as low as 3%) of the population. Of the Ancient Egyptian religion no adherents still exist. Practically all Muslims are Sunni.
The Christians are mainly Copts, divided into two groups, the one having close organizational ties to the Roman Catholic Church. There are other small Christian groups, standard Roman Catholics, Greek Orthodox, and Armenian Orthodox, in Alexandria and Cairo, whose adherents are mainly descendants of Italian, Greek, and Armenian immigrants. There are also some few, small Jewish communities.
