Egypt 🇪🇬

Egypt is an independent state in Northern Africa, and a member of the United Nations. In formal use it is Arab Republic of Egypt. Cairo is the capital.

By land area it covers 1,002,450 km², which ranks it 31st of the 249 countries and territories in this dataset — just behind Mauritania and just ahead of Tanzania. That makes it a little larger than Nigeria.

Around 116.5 million people live there, placing it 13th of 249 by population — between Japan above it and the Philippines below. Within Northern Africa alone it is the 4th largest of 7 and the 1st most populous.

Density comes out at around 116 people per square kilometre, which makes it more crowded than the typical entry on this list. The median across all 249 entries here is about 91 per square kilometre.

Officially it is monolingual: Arabic. Arabic is one of the widely shared official languages here, listed by 24 other entries including Algeria, Bahrain, Chad and the Comoros.

The demonym is Egyptian, so residents are Egyptians.

Inside Africa it places 3rd of 59 by population, and it accounts for 43% of everyone living in Northern Africa.

Put next to every other entry on this site, Egypt ranks 31st of 249 by area and 13th by population. That works out at 0.67% of the combined land area of all 249 entries and 1.4% of their combined population. Those denominators matter: this list includes territories and dependencies as well as UN member states, so a rank here is not the same as a rank among sovereign countries.

For a sense of scale, the entries immediately either side of Egypt in the size ordering are Mauritania at 1,030,700 km² and Tanzania at 945,087 km², against Egypt's 1,002,450 km². If you can already picture one of those, you can picture this one.

Density tells a different story from either raw figure. Egypt averages 116 people per square kilometre of total area, which makes it middling in density — 104th of the 247 entries that have both a population and a measured area. Total area includes inland water, so the true figure for habitable land is higher than this.

Within Northern Africa, Egypt is the most populous of the 7 entries this site lists, and 4th by area. Sudan is next in line by population.

Every entry in Northern Africa has its own guide here, so if you want to work through the whole neighbourhood rather than one country at a time, Sudan is the place to carry on.

• 🇸🇩 Sudan
• 🇪🇬 Egypt

Its reference point sits at 27.0° north and 30.0° east, which puts it in the northern hemisphere, roughly 3,006 km from the equator, in what geographers would call subtropical latitudes.

The Tropic of Cancer passes across it. Countries on the same parallel, far away in longitude, include Nepal and Bhutan.

4 countries share a land border with it: Israel, Libya, Palestine and Sudan. The largest of them by area is Sudan, which is also the most populous. Together those neighbours hold about 73.1 million people.

It has both a coastline and land borders, which is the most common arrangement of all.

Egypt does not have the Egyptian pound to itself. It is one of 2 entries on this site that use the currency, whose code is EGP, and the other one is listed below. A shared currency usually points at something real — a monetary union, a currency board, a former colonial administration, or a small economy pegging itself to a large neighbour's money — and it means a price quoted in EGP travels further than you might expect.

Language reaches wider still. Arabic is listed for 25 entries here, Egypt among them, so a visitor who speaks it can be understood across a large part of the map. Shared language tends to outlive the empires, trade routes and migrations that spread it, which is why the linguistic map and the political one rarely line up.

The currency is the Egyptian pound (£, EGP). That currency appears nowhere else on this list.

If a quiz asks for the capital of Egypt, the answer is Cairo.

Its internet country code is .eg. Calls from overseas start with +20. In ISO terms it is eg in two letters and EGY in three.

As a sovereign state it is among the 192 UN members listed here. The other 57 entries are territories, dependencies or observers, which is why totals on this site run to 249 rather than the familiar 195.