Egypt Desert
Egypt is almost entirely desert. About 96% of the country's land is dry uninhabited desert, mostly part of the wider Sahara Desert. The rest, less than 4% of the land, is the narrow green strip along the Nile River where almost the entire population of over 100 million people live. Without the Nile, Egypt would be one of the most empty deserts in the world.
- % of Egypt that is desert96%Almost the whole country
- Population in the desertapprox. 4 millionLess than 5% of all Egyptians
- Population by the Nileapprox. 96 million99% of all Egyptians
- Famous partWestern DesertThe eastern Sahara
- Famous oasesSiwa, Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla, KhargaThe "Western Desert Oases"
- Hottest tempapprox. 51 °CIn the deep desert in summer
Egypt: population vs land
Almost all of Egypt is desert. Almost all Egyptians live on the tiny green strip along the Nile and in its delta.
What are the Egyptian deserts?
Egypt's deserts split naturally into two parts, divided by the Nile.
- The Western Desert is the part of Egypt that lies west of the Nile. It is the eastern edge of the great Sahara Desert and covers about two-thirds of Egypt. The Western Desert is mostly flat plateau with dramatic depressions (the Qattara Depression sinks to 133 metres below sea level), scattered oases and vast sand seas.
- The Eastern Desert lies between the Nile and the Red Sea. It is more mountainous, with the Red Sea Hills rising over 2,000 metres in places. The Eastern Desert is rich in minerals (gold, copper, semi-precious stones) and was an important source for ancient Egyptian civilisation.
- The Sinai Peninsula is technically the third desert region, east of the Suez Canal and largely separate from the rest of Egypt.
The famous oases
The Western Desert contains a chain of five major oases, traditionally called the "New Valley": Siwa (in the northwest, near the Libyan border), Bahariya, Farafra, Dakhla and Kharga. Each is a green island in the desert, sustained by groundwater rising to the surface from deep aquifers. Date palms, olive groves and vegetable gardens grow in the oases, and small communities have lived in them for thousands of years.
The Siwa Oasis is the most isolated and culturally unique. The Siwan people speak their own Berber language (different from Arabic) and have their own customs. The famous ancient Oracle of Amun, visited by Alexander the Great in 331 BC, was in Siwa.
Ancient Egypt and the desert
The ancient Egyptian civilisation depended on the Nile for water and farmland but used the desert as a defensive barrier and a source of important materials. The deserts protected ancient Egypt from invasion: armies could not easily cross hundreds of kilometres of waterless sand. The Eastern Desert provided gold (Egypt was the richest gold-producing country of the ancient world), copper, turquoise, and the famous "imperial porphyry" purple stone used for emperors' tombs.
The desert was also where ancient Egyptians built most of their famous tombs, including the pyramids and the Valley of the Kings. The dry desert air preserves human remains and artefacts incredibly well, which is why so many treasures survive.
Modern desert challenges
Egypt has been trying to expand farming and settlement into the desert for decades through various irrigation projects. The most ambitious is the New Valley Project, which aims to bring water from Lake Nasser to develop the western oases into a major agricultural region. The Toshka Project, launched in the 1990s, has had mixed results: vast investment but slower-than-hoped development. Climate change is making everything harder by raising temperatures and reducing the reliability of Nile flows.
Deeper dive: the Qattara Depression, fossil water and Nile politics
The Qattara Depression in Egypt's Western Desert is one of the largest below-sea-level areas on Earth, covering around 19,500 square km and reaching 133 metres below sea level at its lowest point. The depression formed over millions of years by wind erosion gradually removing soft sedimentary rocks. The salt flats and shifting sand at the bottom of the depression are virtually impassable. Various ambitious schemes have been proposed over the years to connect the depression to the Mediterranean Sea by canal and use the elevation difference to generate hydroelectric power. None has ever been built; the engineering challenges are too great.
The Western Desert oases are sustained by water from the Nubian Sandstone Aquifer System, one of the largest groundwater reserves on Earth. The aquifer covers approx. 2 million square km beneath the eastern Sahara (Egypt, Libya, Sudan and Chad) and contains a vast quantity of water that fell as rain during wetter climates between roughly 10,000 and 5,000 years ago. This "fossil water" is essentially non-renewable: only tiny amounts of modern rainfall reach the aquifer. The four countries that share the aquifer are pumping water out far faster than nature replaces it, especially under Libyan and Egyptian agricultural development projects. The Great Man-Made River of Libya, the largest engineering project in Africa, pumps water from this aquifer to coastal cities. The aquifer could be depleted within centuries at current pumping rates.
Egypt depends almost entirely on the Nile, and almost all of the Nile's water originates outside Egypt: approx. 86% comes from the Blue Nile and other Ethiopian highland rivers, with the rest from the White Nile system in Uganda, Sudan and other countries. Egypt has traditionally claimed a dominant share of the Nile's flow based on colonial-era treaties from 1929 and 1959 (negotiated by Britain and Egypt without much consultation with the upstream African countries). With the construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam, Ethiopia is now asserting its own right to the Blue Nile's flow, leading to ongoing diplomatic tension between Egypt, Sudan and Ethiopia. The fundamental issue is that Egypt's entire civilisation depends on water flowing from countries that increasingly want to use that water themselves.