Egypt's population, estimated at 3 million when Napoleon invaded the country in 1798, has increased at varying rates. The population grew gradually and steadily throughout the nineteenth century, doubling in size over the course of eighty years. Beginning in the 1880s, the growth rate accelerated, and the population increased more than 600 percent in 100 years. The growth rate was especially high after World War II. In 1947 a census indicated that Egypt's population was 19 million. A census in 1976 revealed that the population had ballooned to 36.6 million. After 1976 the population grew at an annual rate of 2.9 percent and in 1986 reached a total of 50.4 million, including about 2.3 million Egyptians working in other countries.
Projections indicated the population would reach 60 million by 1996.
Egypt's population in mid-1990 was estimated at 52.5 million, about an 8 percent increase over the 1986 figure. The increase meant that the annual population growth rate had slowed slightly to 2.6 percent. Although Egypt's overall population density in 1990 was only about fifty-four people per square kilometer, close to 99 percent of all Egyptians lived along the banks of the Nile River in 3.5 percent of the country's total area. Average population densities in the Nile Valley exceeded 1,500 per square kilometer--one of the world's highest densities (see fig. 4).
According to the 1986 census, 51.1 percent of Egypt's population was male and 48.9 percent female. More than 34 percent of the population was twelve years old or younger, and 68 percent was under age thirty. Fewer than 3 percent of Egyptians were sixty-five years or older. In 1989 average life expectancy at birth was fifty-nine years for men and sixty years for women. The infant mortality rate was 94 deaths per 1,000 births. Although the urban population has been increasing at a higher rate than the rural population since the 1947 census, approximately 51 percent of people still lived in villages in 1986. By the end of 1989, however, demographers estimated the urban-rural distribution to be equal.
Population Control Policies
Egypt's population is very large in relation to the country's natural resources. Although it is not a perfect measure of the impact of high population growth rates, the amount of land cultivated by the average farmer provides a glimpse at the extent of the problem. In slightly more than 150 years (1821-1976), the per capita cultivated area dropped from 0.8 feddan (see Glossary) to 0.27 feddan among the rural population. If the urban population is included, the per capita cultivated area in 1976 amounted to only 0.15 feddan. The decline has meant that the same amount of cultivated land must feed a continuously increasing population. In 1974 Egypt, which had been a net exporter of cereals for centuries, became a net importer of food, especially grains.
As early as 1959, government economists expressed concern about the negative impact of high population growth rates on the country's development efforts. In 1966 the government initiated a nationwide birth control program aimed at reducing the annual population growth rate to 2.5 percent or less. Since then state-run family planning clinics have distributed birth control information and contraceptives. These programs were somewhat successful in reducing the population growth rate, but in 1973 the rate began to increase again. Population control policies tended to be ineffective because most Egyptians, especially in rural areas, valued large families.
Major Cities
Although Egypt's urban history is lengthy, modern urbanization, characterized by massive and continuing rural-to-urban migration, is largely a post-World War II phenomenon. Since 1947, urban growth rates have averaged about one percentage point higher than the rates for rural areas. Thus, for forty years, the urban population has been expanding at the rate of 4 percent annually. Cairo, the country's capital and largest city, has been affected the most by this urbanization. Between 1947 and 1986, the city's population grew from 1.5 million to more than 6 million (within the city's corporate limits). During the same period, the population of Giza (Al Jizah), across the Nile from Cairo, grew even more dramatically, from 18,000 to 1.6 million. In 1989 an estimated 10.5 million people, or 20 percent of all Egyptians, lived in the urban agglomeration known as Greater Cairo, which extended along both banks of the Nile from Shubra al Khaymah in the north to Hulwan in the south. Within the city's boundaries, the population density averaged 26,000 people per square kilometer. In some of the more crowded quarters of the city, such as Rawd al Faraj, densities were as high as 135,000 per square kilometer.
Cairo is an ancient city, occupying a site that has been continuously inhabited for more than 3,500 years. Over the centuries, there have been nine distinct cities where Cairo is located. The "modern" city was founded in 969 near the site of ancient Egypt's Khere-ohe, better known in the West by its Greek name of Heliopolis. In Arabic, "Cairo" means "victorious" and is the same name used for the planet Mars. Cairo has consistently been a city of preeminence in the Arab world for more than 1,000 years, but its political and economic influence within and beyond Egypt has varied. One of its more illustrious periods ran from 1170 to 1345, when Cairo became one of the world's largest cities with a population of about 500,000. The layout of central Cairo remains similar to what it was during that time. Many of the city's renowned mosques--there are more than 600 Islamic monuments in Cairo--also date back to the medieval period. Cairo's importance derived from its role as a center for the production and export of textiles and refined sugar and for goods manufactured from cotton, flax, and sugarcane. Cairo was also a transshipment center for overland trade from India and Africa to Europe.
The plague known as the Black Death devastated Cairo and the rest of Egypt between 1347 and 1350. The plague killed about 40 percent of the country's population.
Cairo quickly lost its preeminent role as a transshipment center when the Europeans discovered a maritime route to India and China around the Cape of Good Hope. Cairo remained Egypt's administrative and commercial center, but it experienced relative economic stagnation for the next three centuries. By the time Napoleon conquered the city in 1798, its population had declined to approximately 200,000.
During the nineteenth century, the rise of the cotton export trade, government sponsorship of industrial development, and the completion of the construction of the Suez Canal in 1869 revitalized Cairo, and the city began to grow again. During the last half of the nineteenth century, the French approach to urban planning changed Cairo's layout. Egypt's ruler, Ismail (1863-79), had been educated in France and aspired to have his capital rival Paris. To coincide with the ceremonies for the opening of the Suez Canal, Ismail proposed a design for "modern" Cairo. The proposal included a wooden replica of La Scala opera house in Milan. The structure was to host the premier of Giuseppe Verdi's opera Aida. Ismail's efforts to build a modern Cairo resulted in a separation--still apparent today--between the western part of the city, called Al Izbakiya Gardens (which is European) and the eastern part (which is Arabic).
Cairo has continued to grow rapidly since 1850, when its population was approximately 250,000. By 1930 the population had reached 1 million. Throughout the twentieth century, it has been the most populous city in Africa and the Arab world. Cairo's development has been most intense since World War II, and has resulted in a variety of problems. The city's population, growing about 300,000 per year in the 1980s, has strained urban services to the breaking point. Public transportation was woefully inadequate in the late 1980s, with about one of every four buses out of commission at any given time. Public water supplies, sewer facilities, and trash collection were all overburdened (see Urban Society, this ch.). Housing was perhaps the most pressing problem because persistent shortages of skilled labor and construction materials hampered efforts to build residential units quickly enough to meet demand. The demand for moderately priced housing was especially high. Some people resorted to clandestine and semilegal housing arrangements; as many as 200,000 wooden, cardboard, and metal huts were constructed on the roofs of apartment buildings. An estimated 500,000 people were living in the mausoleums in the city's cemeteries.
Alexandria is Egypt's second largest city. Located on the coastline of the Mediterranean Sea, it has been an important port ever since it was founded by Alexander the Great more than 2,300 years ago. The city declined dramatically during the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries when its maritime trade with Europe virtually ceased as a result of new sea routes around Africa to India. When the French landed at Alexandria in 1798, barely 10,000 people lived in the city. Alexandria grew substantially in the nineteenth century because of industrialization and Egypt's emergence as an exporter of agricultural commodities to Europe. Between 1821 and 1846, Alexandria's population grew from 12,500 to 164,000. By the end of the century, its population had almost doubled to 320,000. Between 1947 and 1986, Alexandria's population grew from 700,000 to 2.7 million.
In 1990 Alexandria was a major industrial center that included two large oil refineries; chemical, cement, and metal plants; textile mills; and food processing operations. Alexandria is also the country's most important harbor for exports and imports.
Egypt's third and fourth largest cities, Giza and Shubra al Khaymah, are part of Greater Cairo. The rapid growth of these cities since 1947 is directly related to the growth of Cairo. Giza (1986 population 1.6 million), opposite the Nile River island of Ar Rawdah, is the location of Cairo University and the famed Pyramids of Giza. Shubra al Khaymah (1986 population 500,000), on the Nile north of Cairo's Bulaq quarter, is a manufacturing suburb with a heavy concentration of textile factories.
As of 1989, Egypt had nine other cities with populations greater than 200,000. In the Delta were Al Mahallah al Kubra with a population of 375,000, Tanta with 365,000, Al Mansurah with 335,000, Az Zaqaziq with 260,000, and Damanhur with 215,000. These five cities were local administrative, commercial, and manufacturing centers. At the northern and southern termini of the Suez Canal were Port Said with a population of 358,000 and Suez with 271,000. In Upper Egypt were Asyut on the Nile with a population of 250,000 and Al Fayyum, an oasis with a population of 215,000. Five other cities had populations ranging between 150,00 and 200,000. These included Al Minya, Aswan, and Bani Suwayf in Upper Egypt; Kafr ad Dawwar in the Delta; and Ismailia (Al Ismailiyah) on the Suez Canal.
Emigration
The 1986 census estimated that 2.25 million Egyptian nationals were working outside the country. Only small numbers of Egyptians, primarily professionals, had left the country in search of employment before 1974. Then, in that year, the government lifted all restrictions on labor migration. The move came at a time when oil-rich Arab states of the Persian Gulf and neighboring Libya were implementing major development programs with funds generated by the quadrupling of oil revenues in 1973. By 1975 an estimated 500,000 Egyptians, mostly single, unskilled men, were working on construction sites in Libya, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, and the United Arab Emirates. At least 50,000 others were employed elsewhere in the Middle East. By 1980 more than 1 million Egyptians were working abroad. That number doubled by 1982. The emergence of foreign job opportunities alleviated some of the pressure on domestic employment. Many of these workers sent a significant portion of their earnings to their families in Egypt. As early as 1979, these remittances amounted to US$2 billion, a sum equivalent to the country's combined earnings from cotton exports, Suez Canal transit fees, and tourism (see Remittances, ch. 3).
The foreign demand for Egyptian labor peaked in 1983, at which time an estimated 3.28 million Egyptians workers were employed abroad. After that year, political and economic developments in the Arab oil-producing countries caused a retrenchment in employment opportunities. The Iran-Iraq War decline in oil prices forced the Persian Gulf oil industry into a recession, which caused many Egyptians to lose their jobs. Up to 1 million workers returned home. Most of the expatriate workforce remained abroad but new labor migration from Egypt slowed considerably. In late 1989, the number of Egyptian workers abroad still exceeded 2.2 million.
The majority of Egyptian labor migrants expected to return home eventually, but thousands left their country each year with the intention of permanently resettling in various Arab countries, Europe, or North America. These emigrants tended to be highly educated professionals, mostly doctors, engineers, and teachers. Their departure caused a serious "brain drain" for Egypt. Iraq and, to a lesser extent, Kuwait were the Arab countries most likely to accept skilled Egyptians as permanent residents. Iraq, which sought agriculturists trained in irrigation techniques, encouraged Egyptian farmers to move to the sparsely populated but fertile lands in the south. Outside of the Arab countries, the United States was a preferred destination. Between 1970 and 1985, about 45,000 Egyptians immigrated to the United States.
In 1989 there were several thousand Americans, Europeans, and other non-Arabs in Egypt working on projects sponsored by foreign governments, international agencies, and private charitable groups. The United States stationed more than 2,000 diplomatic personnel in the country. The majority of these personnel worked for the United States Agency for International Development (AID), which managed the largest of the many economic aid programs in Egypt. Projects financed by AID during the 1980s included irrigation networks, rural sanitation systems, pest control, family planning, and communications development.
Since 1948 Egypt has been a haven for Arab refugees and political dissidents. The number of exiles has fluctuated in response to political developments in other Arab countries and to Egypt's relations with the different regimes. In 1989 Egypt was host to several thousand Palestinian refugees and hundreds of exiles from Libya, Sudan, and various countries of the Arabian Peninsula, especially the Yemen Arab Republic (North Yemen) and the People's Democratic Republic of Yemen (South Yemen). Egyptian accusations that Libya had sponsored terrorist acts against Libyan exiles in Egypt fueled tension between the two countries in the late 1970s and 1980s.
Minorities
Although the ancestors of the Egyptian people include many races and ethnic groups, including Africans, Arabs, Berbers, Greeks, Persians, Romans, and Turks, the population today is relatively homogeneous linguistically and culturally. Nevertheless, approximately 3 percent of Egyptians belong to minority groups. Linguistic minorities include small communities of Armenians and Greeks, principally in the cities of Cairo and Alexandria; groups of Berber origin in the oases of the Western Desert; and Nubians living in cities in Lower Egypt and in villages clustered along the Nile in Upper Egypt. The Arabic-speaking beduins (nomads) in the Western and Eastern Deserts and the Sinai Peninsula constitute the principal cultural minority. Several hundred Europeans, mostly Italians and French, also lived in Egypt.
In 1989 an estimated 350,000 Greeks constituted Egypt's largest non-Arab minority. Greeks have lived in Egypt since before the time of Alexander the Great. For centuries they have remained culturally, linguistically, and religiously separate from the Egyptians. In 1990 the majority of Greeks lived in Alexandria, although many resided in Cairo.
Armenians have also lived in Egypt for several centuries, although their numbers have declined as a result of heavy emigration since the 1952 Revolution. In 1989 the Armenian community in Egypt was estimated at 12,000. Cairo was traditionally the center of Armenian culture in Egypt, but many Armenians also lived in Alexandria.
An estimated 6,000 Egyptians of Berber origin lived in the Western Desert near the border with Libya. They were ethnically related to the Berber peoples of North Africa. The largest Berber community lived in Siwah Oasis. The Berbers are Muslims, but they have their own language, which is not related to Arabic, and certain unique cultural practices.
About 160,000 Nubians, also Muslims, lived in Egypt in 1990. Most Nubians lived in cities, especially Cairo, Alexandria, and urban areas along the Suez Canal. In the past, Nubians had lived in villages along the Nile from Aswan southward to about 500 kilometers inside Sudan. Before the construction of the Aswan High Dam forced their resettlement, three linguistically separate groups of Nubians lived in this region--the Kenuzi in northern Nubia; the beduin-descended Arabs in central Nubia; and the Fadija-speaking people in southern Nubia near Abu Simbel (Abu Sunbul). Isolated geographically and politically for centuries, the Nubian Valley was only rarely under the control of any central government. Until Egypt's 1952 Revolution, Nubia lacked strong political links with Lower Egypt. Nevertheless, Nubia had persistent economic ties to the rest of Egypt. Since at least the nineteenth century, Nubian men have migrated to the cities of Lower Egypt, where they typically worked for several years at a time as merchants and wage laborers. Nubian society adapted to the migrants' prolonged absences. Complex kinship and property relations enabled men to leave and still take care of their families, guard their wives, and ensure protection of their herds and crops.
After 1952 the central government increased its involvement in Nubia, mostly by building schools and public health services. With the construction of the Aswan High Dam, the government's involvement in the area destroyed Nubia, as water inundated the Nubian Valley. In 1963 and 1964 the government resettled approximately 50,000 Nubians to thirty-three villages around Kawm Umbu, about fifty kilometers north of the city of Aswan. As compensation, the government gave the Nubians new land and homes and provided them with some financial support until their new holdings were productive.
Nubians were dissatisfied with their resettlement for several reasons. They did not like their government-built, cement-block houses, which were uncomfortable and vastly different in design from their old homes. Further, their resettlement at Kawm Umbu disrupted family ties and ignored historical rivalries among the three Nubian ethnic groups. The government also required the Nubian farmers to join agricultural cooperatives and pressured them to cultivate sugarcane, a crop that had not been part of their traditional culture. Dissatisfaction with the resettlement program led many to migrate to cities. A large number of migrants rented their land to sharecroppers and tenants from Upper Egypt. After the Aswan High Dam was completed in 1971, a handful of Nubians left the resettlement area and returned to Nubia, where they established farming villages along the shores of Lake Nasser. By the early 1980s, Nubians had constructed at least four villages, complete with traditional homes.
Egypt's largest minority group consisted of several tribes of beduins who traditionally lived in the Eastern and Western Deserts and the Sinai Peninsula. Because the beduins spoke Arabic dialects, the government did not consider them ethnic minorities. Nevertheless, almost everyone in Egypt--including the beduins--considered these people as culturally distinct. The beduins have historically been nomads, but since the nineteenth century, most tribes have adopted sedentary agricultural life-styles, in response to various government incentives (see Social Organization, this ch.). Among the beduins, traditional tribal social structure comprised lineage segments linked to specific territories, water, and pasture. Descent was patrilineal, and most beduins sought patterns of kinship and marriage that would strengthen the bonds between patrilineally related males. A patrilineage acted as a corporate group that shared the home territory's resources and lived together for most of the year. In the event of a feud, the group would collectively seek revenge, either through the death of the other group's males or through collective payment of compensation. A family's livelihood depended on its sheep, goats, and camels. Inheritance customs usually kept the family herds in the hands of fathers, sons, brothers, and cousins related through the male line.
In 1990 the total number of beduins in Egypt ranged between 500,000 and 1 million--less than 1 percent of the country's population. Over the centuries, their numbers fluctuated as governments alternately ignored and persecuted them. In the 1890s, beduins comprised as much as 10 percent of the total population. During the twentieth century, sedentarization and urban migration have caused many beduins to become assimilated into Egypt's dominant culture.
Since the 1952 Revolution, Egypt has intensified its efforts to persuade beduins to abandon their nomadic life-style. The beduins of the Western Desert generally resisted pressure to become farmers. Some beduins engaged in the profitable trade of smuggling goods across the Libyan border into Egypt while others became involved in the hotel and restaurant business in the summer tourist town of Marsa Matruh. The beduins in the Eastern Desert continued to maintain close ties with nomads on the Arabian Peninsula and profited from the high demand for meat and livestock in Saudi Arabia. The Aswan High Dam submerged some summer pasture and disrupted some migratory routes along the Red Sea coast that beduins customarily used in bringing their herds to Nubia during that season. Beduin settlements tended to be overcrowded, a situation that exacerbated feuding among various lineages. And, as beduin herds encroached on cropland, friction between agriculturists and pastoralists intensified. An increasing number of beduin families began to emulate tribal leaders by sending sons to college to prepare them for civil service careers in local government.