ABSTRACT
The strategic importance of Egypt, situated at the meeting-point of Europe, Africa and Asia, with a coastline on two oceans, has ensured that its rulers and people have seldom been free to enjoy in tranquillity the self-sufficient existence that the extraordinary ‘gift of the Nile’ could provide. Nowadays, conditioned partly by our European outlook and partly by the language of Egyptian nationalism, we tend to see Egyptian history as a chronicle of invasion and occupation by foreign powers-Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Turks, down to Napoleon and the British. For the most part, the invaders were ultimately either absorbed into or expelled by the enduring Egyptian body politic. But there were not a few periods in which Egypt played the imperial role itself, under a variety of rulers including the early Pharaohs, Saladin, Muhammad Ali and Nasser. More often than not, their antagonists have been the rulers of the other great river-basin, Mesopotamia, in an unending contest for control over Syria.
