“The history of Egypt is the longest continuous history, as a unified state, of any country in the world. The Nile valley forms a natural geographic and economic unit, bounded to the east and west by deserts, to the north by the sea and to the south by the Cataracts of the Nile. The need to have a single authority to manage the waters of the Nile led to the creation of the world’s first state in about 3000 BC. Egypt’s peculiar geography made it a difficult country to attack, which is why Pharaonic Egypt was for so long an independent and self-contained state. Once Egypt did succumb to foreign rule, however, it proved unable to escape from it, and for 2,400 years Egypt was governed by foreigners..