Egypt, officially the Arab Republic of Egypt, is a country in the northeast corner of Africa, whose territory in the Sinai Peninsula extends beyond the continental boundary with Asia.
Egypt is bordered by the Gaza Strip (Palestinian territories) and Israel to the northeast, the Gulf of Aqaba and the Red Sea to the east, Sudan to the south, Libya to the west, and the Mediterranean Sea to the north. Across the Gulf of Aqaba lies Jordan, across the Red Sea lies Saudi Arabia, and across the Mediterranean Sea lie Greece, Cyprus and Turkey, although none of these share a land border with Egypt.
Five hundred kilometres southwest of Cairo, the flat sabkha plain stretches in all directions covered by a small layer of dark, round pebbles. There are spectacular limestone pillars dotting the landscape of the wonderful karst topography. This land, once the breadbasket of Egypt and the stomping ground of the Pharaohs, is now ruled by pipelines and rusted-out trucks abandoned as wrecks marking the passage of time. Beneath the sand, rust and human history lie some very interesting geology. This rock has been sculpted both through erosion and at the hands of her craftsmen.
The rock here was formed when the Earth's crust was just beginning to cool, 4 to 2.5 billion years ago, during the Archaean. Other rock dates back to the Proterozoic when the Earth's atmosphere was just beginning to form. The oldest of these are found as inliers in Egypt’s Western Desert. The rocks making up the Eastern Desert are largely late Proterozoic in age, the time when bacteria and marine algae were the principal forms of life.
Throughout the country, this older basement is overlain by Palaeozoic sedimentary rocks. Cretaceous outcrops are common. We also find sediments that tell a story of repeated marine transgression and regressions, sea levels rising and falling, characteristic of the Cenozoic. It is from Egypt's Cenozoic geology that we get the limestones used for the great pyramids.
