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For almost 30 centuries—from its unification around 3100 B.C. to its conquest by Alexander the Great in 332 B.C.—ancient Egypt was the preeminent civilization in the Mediterranean world

Neolithic (late Stone Age) communities in northeastern Africa exchanged hunting for agriculture and made early advances that paved the way for the later development of Egyptian arts and crafts, technology, politics and religion (including a great reverence for the dead and possibly a belief in life after death).

agriculture (largely wheat and barley) formed the economic base of the Egyptian state. The annual flooding of the great Nile River provided the necessary irrigation and fertilization each year; farmers sowed the wheat after the flooding receded and harvested it before the season of high temperatures and drought returned.

In just the last two weeks, Islamist militants have detonated a car bomb at the gates of the capital’s security headquarters, gunned down a senior Interior Ministry official in broad daylight and shot down a military helicopter over Sinai with a portable surface-to-air missile.

Egyptians returning from jihad abroad to join a campaign of terrorism against the military-backed government.

“Egypt is again an open front for jihad,” said Brian Fishman, a researcher in counterterrorism at the New America Foundation in Washington. “The world is being turned on its head, and, for the United States, the ability to rely on Egypt as a stabilizing force in the region — rather than a source of problems — is really being challenged.

The uneasy relationship between European economic interests and foreign policy ideals was on full display Wednesday in the German capital.

Standing by Sisi at a joint news conference in Berlin, Merkel said that Germany and Egypt have many common interests but maintain different views on issues such as the death sentence and other human rights matters. “I think that if one wants to be partners and solve complex issues, we have to be able talk about these things,” she said.

Despite Merkel’s criticism and the ideological sparring, the the trip has been a big success for Sisi, whose regime “presides over the gravest human rights crisis Egypt in decades,” according to a joint statement by Amnesty International and other nongovernmental organizations. She previously stated that she would not host him in Berlin until Egypt held fair parliamentary elections. Such elections have not yet taken place.

Egypt’s Parliament on Wednesday expelled a well-known television personality turned lawmaker over a dinner he had with the Israeli ambassador — a vote that exposed a raw nerve in the mostly tranquil relationship between the two countries.

Although Egypt and Israel enjoy close security cooperation, particularly in the struggle against Islamist extremists in Sinai, many Egyptians view Israel with hostility over its policies toward the Palestinians, and public interactions with Israeli officials are considered taboo.

That fear, he said, has its basis in a conspiracy theory: that Israel has secretly been helping Ethiopia build the dam as a means of hurting Egyptian interests.

The main missionary and political groups of the ultraconservatives, known as Salafis, threw their support behind Abdel Moneim Aboul Fotouh, a dissident former leader of the Muslim Brotherhood known for his tolerant and inclusive view of Islamic law.

The endorsement goes a long way toward making Mr. Aboul Fotouh the front-runner in a campaign that could shape the ultimate outcome of the revolt that ousted the former strongman, Hosni Mubarak.

Mr. Aboul Fotouh’s liberal understanding of Islamic law on matters of individual freedom and economic equality had already made him the preferred candidate of many Egyptian liberals.

Ancient Egyptians and their modern counterparts share less in common than you might think.

decoded the genome of ancient Egyptians for the first time, with unexpected results.

preserved remains found in Abusir-el Meleq, Middle Egypt, were closest genetic relatives of Neolithic and Bronze Age populations from the Near East, Anatolia and Eastern Mediterranean Europeans.

EgyptAir Flight Believed to Have Crashed at Sea; Egypt Cites Possible Terrorism

the Greek authorities said debris believed to be from the wreckage had been found at a site around 205 nautical miles southeast of Crete and 190 nautical miles south of the Greek island of Karpathos.

Mr. Fathi said. Still, he said, “if you analyze the situation properly,” the possibility of “having a terror attack is higher than the possibility” of technical failure.

making it far less likely that she will encounter the verbal abuse or physical and sexual assaults that women have come to expect on Cairo’s streets.

“I am a woman from Egypt, so I face harassment in the streets daily,” Ms. Helal, 29, said in a phone interview this week.

She has to be acutely aware of her surroundings every time she photographs in a crowd in public, constantly evaluate her safety and make sure there is a clear escape route in case she is attacked. While public harassment of women has been commonplace, it was not until an incident four years ago, while covering a peaceful protest on International Women’s Day, that she started documenting these encounters. It was a few months after the start of the Arab Spring in Egypt, and women went to Tahrir Square to hand out flowers in support of women’s rights.

Yemen’s trajectory should not surprise anyone. It follows a familiar pattern in the Arab world, one that we are likely to see again — possibly in larger and more significant countries like Egypt.

Yemen was ruled for 33 years by a secular dictator, Ali Abdullah Saleh. He ruthlessly suppressed opposition groups, especially those with a religious or sectarian orientation (in this case, the Houthis, who are Shiite). After 9/11, he cooperated wholeheartedly with Washington’s war on terrorism, which meant he got money, arms and training from the United States.

But the repression ensured that, over time, dissent would grow. Saleh’s regime faced political and military opposition, and eventually, during the Arab Spring, he was forced to resign.

Egypt has accused Palestinian Islamist group Hamas of involvement in the killing of Egypt's public prosecutor.

Hisham Barakat died in hospital after a bomb attack on his car in the Cairo suburb of Heliopolis in March 2015.

The plot was "carried out on the orders of the Muslim Brotherhood in close coordination with Hamas", Egypt's interior minister said on Sunday.

In Tunisia and Egypt, Islamists, who were long perceived as opponents of the democratic system, are now promoting and joyfully participating in it. Even the ultra-Orthodox Salafis now have deputies sitting in the Egyptian Parliament, thanks to the ballots that they, until very recently, denounced as heresy.

It was the exclusion and suppression of Islamists by secular tyrants that originally bred extremism.

as Fareed Zakaria warned in his 2003 book “The Future of Freedom,” there are illiberal democracies, too, where the majority’s power isn’t checked by constitutional liberalism, and the rights and freedoms of all citizens are not secured. This is a risk for the post-Arab Spring countries, and even for post-Kemalist Turkey. The real debate, therefore, is whether Islam is compatible with liberalism.

Is the era of the military big man back?

The turmoil highlights the central role of the military in some postcolonial Muslim countries, where at least in the fitful early stages of democracy, it forcefully imposes itself as the self-appointed arbiter of power and the guardian of national identity.

But a look at other Muslim countries that have struggled with democratic transitions, including two other polestars of the Muslim world, Pakistan and Turkey, should provide a kind of warning to General Sisi.

Looking for a potential bright spot in the roiling upheaval of the Middle East, American and Israeli officials meeting in Jerusalem on Monday held out the hope of growing security cooperation between Israel and its Arab neighbors in the Persian Gul

“The U.S. and the regional allies cannot find a solution to Syria, stabilize Egypt and halt the Iranian threat without the other,” Mr. al-Otaiba said. “There is simply no way around working together to resolve these issues.”

“World jihadists are not fighting only against Israel,” said Lt. Gen. Benny Gantz, chief of the Israeli Defense Forces, adding that it would behoove neighboring states to look for ways to combat common enemies.

Egyptian President Abdel-Fattah el-Sissi travels to Berlin on Tuesday, where German leaders are ready to roll out the red carpet for the ex-general despite his government's abysmal human rights record.

But with much of the Middle East plunged into violent chaos in the years since the Arab Spring uprisings, Western nations have once again come to see many of the region's autocrats as partners for stability.

Just this past Sunday, Egypt's state-sanctioned rights body criticized the practice of detaining suspects for extended periods pending the filing of formal charges and trial. It said that at least 2,600 people were killed in violence in the 18 months following Morsi's overthrow, nearly half of them his supporters.

In an unusual daytime attack near Egypt’s most visible tourist attraction, gunmen shot and killed two police officers on Wednesday, a few hundred yards from the pyramids of Giza, security officials said.

Amr Farrag is a prominent Muslim Brotherhood youth cadre. The 28-year-old Cairene is a widely followed exponent of the organization’s ideology on social media and manages the popular pro-Brotherhood news portal Rassd. But these days, he no longer operates in Cairo. On July 5, 2013—two days after the Egyptian military responded to mass protests by removing Brotherhood-backed President Mohamed Morsi—the organization’s leaders urged Farrag to relocate to Istanbul, so that he could evade the Egyptian government’s anti-Brotherhood crackdown and reestablish the organization’s media operations in exile. Meanwhile, as many more Muslim Brothers fled to Turkey during the chaotic weeks that followed Morsi’s ouster, the Brotherhood formed a committee in Istanbul to resettle them, hoping to preserve the organization until it could return to power in Egypt, which it promised its members would happen very soon.

the Sinai-based militant group Ansar Beit al-Maqdis, or ABM, allegedly announces its allegiance to ISIS, which calls itself the Islamic State.

blames tyrants and their "Jewish agents and their allies" for decades of Muslim suffering. The message also calls ISIS "the emergence of a new dawn."

The group has killed hundreds of Egyptian police officers and soldiers. The largest attack was last month in the Sinai Peninsula, killing at least 31 soldiers.

No evidence of terrorism in Sinai plane crash, Egypt says

The civil aviation ministry in Cairo said a preliminary report into the Metrojet crash that killed 224 people on 31 October had been completed on Sunday. Nearly all the victims were Russian holidaymakers returning from the Red Sea resort of Sharm el-Sheikh.

Egypt’s chief investigator, Ayman al-Muqaddam, said the search for wreckage had extended more than 10 miles (16km) from the main crash site. He said investigators had analysed the plane’s computers and were currently checking the technical details and repairs carried out on the Airbus A321 since it was built in 1997

In 1905, British archaeologists descended on a sliver of eastern Africa, aiming to uncover and extract artifacts from 3,000-year-old temples. They left mostly with photographs, discouraged by the ever-shifting sand dunes that blanketed the land. “We sank up to the knees at every step,” E. A. Wallis Budge, the British Egyptologist and philologist, wrote at the time, adding: “[We] made several trial diggings in other parts of the site, but we found nothing worth carrying away.”

The first traces of the Nubian kingdom called Kush date to roughly 2,000 B.C. Egyptians conquered parts of the Kushite Kingdom for a few hundred years, and around 1,000 B.C., the Egyptians appear to have died, left, or mixed thoroughly with the local population. At 800 B.C., Kushite kings, also known as the black pharaohs, took over Egypt for a century—two cobras decorating the pharaohs’ crowns signified the unification of kingdoms. And somewhere around 300 A.D., the Kushite empire began to fade away.

“Only now do we realize how much pristine archaeology is just waiting to be found,” says David Edwards, an archaeologist at the University of Leicester in the United Kingdom.“But just as we are becoming aware it’s there, it’s gone,” he adds. Within the next 10 years, Edwards says, “most of ancient Nubia might be swept away.”