Egypt has fascinated European travellers from the time of Herodotus, who wrote the first surviving account of the ancient land. The sheer antiquity and breadth of Egyptian civilization cannot but reduce the visitor to awe, whether it be Napoleon with his famous exhortation to his troops in front of the Pyramids that forty centuries looked down upon them, or the more humble modern traveller exploring the tombs in the Valley of the Kings.

Nearly two thousand years separate King Menes (Narmer), the unifier of Upper and Lower Egypt around 3100 BC, and Rameses II, the builder of Abu Simbel, and it was yet another thousand years before Egypt became a province of Rome.

Throughout this time Egypt has also been a fertile source of legend. The fifty daughters of Danaus fled from a marriage threat by the fifty sons of Aegyptus, as recounted by Aeschylus; and if Euripides is to be believed, Helen of Troy may have sojourned on the banks of the Nile. Biblical references abound of a land of both oppression and refuge. Patriarchs found sustenance in Egypt, Moses led his people forth, and the Holy Family fled there from the wrath of Herod.

Egypt was the first major country to be subdued by the forces of Islam, and the line of conquerors reached a turning-point with Napoleon, who brought an army not only of soldiers but also of scholars. He left both groups to continue without him, and the scholars laboured throughout the land to produce the monumental Description de L’Égypte. The vast detective work of deciphering hieroglyphic script was commenced through the discovery of the Rosetta Stone in 1799, thereby eventually producing the key to our present understanding of ancient Egypt.

Nowhere in the world have so many monuments survived for so long, on such a scale and in such good condition. The magnificence of Egypt’s standing monuments, Pharaonic, Coptic and Islamic, is supplemented by an unrivalled series of tomb sculptures and paintings and by superb collections of jewellery and artefacts in the Egyptian museums.

And through the midst of the land, with its origins in the deep south, flows the Nile, which with its annual inundation was the source of all that has made Egyptian civilisation great.

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