Mohamed Naguib stands over a crowd. It’s 1952, and the street is a flood of vibrant compassion and indispensable hope. It is at this moment that all present, including Naguib himself, are faced with Egypt’s idle, silent truth: two millennia of subjugation. Until that instant—where he motions to a roaring, emancipated crowd—Egypt had spent approximately 2,294 years under foreign rule. From antiquity’s back-to-back conquests, to imperialistic bait-and-switches, Egypt hasn’t caught its breath for countless lifetimes. For arguably too long, Egyptian ideology has been siphoned through foreign power, using foreign tongues. The faces of Greco-Roman gods watch over Alexandria, street signs are dotted and accented in unintentional remembrance of Napoleon, and the essence of Egypt lost between latinized Arabic and forgotten Coptic. There’s a glamour to modern-day diversity—but the past is not so easily polished. From ancient Egypt to the 1950s: here is how long it took for an Egyptian to rule Egypt. The Persian Kings Rapidly expanding and twice as ravenous, Persia annexed Egypt in 525 BCE with no intent on reviving its glory days. Rather, Persian kings had a steely, cold-blooded disposition; they employed “strict and harsh rule over…
