Egyptian

Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz was the first Arabic-language writer to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He received the honor in 1988. Mahfouz is regarded as one of the first writers of Arabic literature to explore themes of existentialism. One of his best known works is The Cairo Trilogy, a series of novels that tell the story of a Muslim family in Cairo during Britain’s occupation of Egypt in the early decades of the 20th century.

The history of Egypt is the longest continuous history, as a unified state, of any country in the world. The civilization of ancient Egypt developed over more than three and a half millennia, beginning with the political unification of the major Nile Valley cultures under one ruler, the first pharaoh, around 3150 BC.