During the course of its history, Egypt was invaded or conquered by a number of foreign powers, including the Hyksos, the Nubians, the Assyrians, the Achaemenid Persians, and the Macedonians under Alexander the Great. The history of ancient Egypt occurred as a series of stable kingdoms, separated by periods of relative instability known as Intermediate Periods: the Old Kingdom of the Early Bronze Age, the Middle Kingdom of the Middle Bronze Age and the New Kingdom of the Late Bronze Age.Įgypt reached the pinnacle of its power during the New Kingdom, ruling much of Nubia and a sizable portion of the Levant, after which it entered a period of slow decline. Ancient Egyptian civilization followed prehistoric Egypt and coalesced around 3100 BC (according to conventional Egyptian chronology) with the political unification of Upper and Lower Egypt under Menes (often identified with Narmer). Ancient Egypt was a civilization of ancient Northeast Africa, concentrated along the lower reaches of the Nile River, situated in the place that is now the country Egypt.
