AUTHOR'S INTRODUCTION
AN interesting monument to Modern Egypt now con-
fronts the newly arrived traveller in the Station Square
of Cairo. Egypt is represented as a Sphinx staring in its
stony trance. The Spirit of Egypt, a female figure,
stands beside it stretching out a hand to rouse it from
its age-long apathy. That is modern Egypt's concep-
tion of itself—a conception to which we shall again and
again return in answering the questions of the Sphinx.
What Modern Egypt is regionally can be easily defined.
It is the lower valley and the delta of the Nile—a belt of
irrigable land broadening as it goes northward, bordered
by desert on either side, and bounded by the Red Sea
on the east and by the Sahara on the west. But what
modern Egypt is racially is more difficult to describe.
For the various races that have at different times settled
in this region have only, during the last few years, begun
td fuse into what can be called an Egyptian. And of all
the new nations that emerged in Eastern Europe and
Western Asia out of the world wars that preluded the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the Egyptian is the
most elusive and enigmatical.
A century ago, after the Napoleonic wars, Egypt burst
into the field of European politics, like a flaming comet,
to the utter disorganisation of the political system of the
day, much as did Turkey after the Great War, Egypt
then represented a force that baffled Western rulers and
broke up European alliances, much as did Turkey a few
years ago. Even so did the Egypt question cause a
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