Submitted by on Sun, 02/22/2009 at 2:52pm.
Egypt (Arabic: مصر Misr ;), officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country in North Africa that includes the Sinai Peninsula, a land bridge to Asia. Covering an area of about 1,001,450 square kilometers (386,560 square miles), Egypt borders Libya to the west, Sudan to the south, and Palestine and Israel to the northeast; on the north and the east are the Mediterranean Sea and the Red Sea, respectively.
Egypt is the fifteenth most populous country in the world. The vast majority of its 78.8 million people (2006) live near the banks of the Nile River (about 40,000 km² or 15,450 sq miles) where the only arable agricultural land is found. Large areas of land form part of the Sahara Desert and are sparsely inhabited. Around half of Egypt's residents live in urban areas, with the majority spread across the densely populated centers of greater Cairo (the largest city in Africa and the Middle East), Alexandria and other major towns in the Nile Delta.
Cairo is the city that never sleeps
Cairo (Arabic: القاهرة transliteration: Al-Qāhirah), which means "the Vanquisher" or "the Triumphant", is the capital and largest city of Egypt. It is the Arab World [1] and Africa's most populous city.[2] While Al-Qahirah is the official name of the city, in Egyptian Arabic it is called by the dialect's name for the country, transliteration: Masr. Within Egypt, residents of Cairo are called Masraweya rather than Masri.
Cairo has a population of about 6.8 million people, according to the 2006 population census.[3] The number of inhabitants was about a million higher at the time of the census, but this was adjusted downwards on the 17th of April 2008 when the new governorate of Helwan was created from parts of a.o. Cairo governorate. Cairo's metropolitan area has a population of about 17.3 million people.[4] Cairo is the sixteenth most populous metropolitan area in the world. It is also the most populous metropolitan area in Africa.