Egypt has captured the imagination of travelers since ancient times. lt’s a multilayered history lesson, with relics left by pharaohs, Greeks, Romans, Christians and Arabs alike. Mud-brick villages rum shoulders with modern buildings of steel and glass, the call of the muezzin with the blare of traffic. Lt’s also a dream dip or a trek across the sands on a camel. And through everything, the majestic River Nile flows on, Egypt’s lifeblood since the dawn of history.

October to May to avoid the heat-or the 3 rd century BC, when Alexandria was the cultural and intellectual capital of the world

Battling tour buses and camel drivers to see the Great Pyramids at Giza-because you known you have to Taking a lazy afternoon drift along the Nile in a felucca at Aswan Feeling very small in Karnak’s Great Hypostyle Hall Living out an oriental fantasy: sipping tea and smoking a shisha (waterpipe) with a thousand and one others at Cairo’s landmark coffeehouse, El-Fishawi Looking into the of ancient history-Tutankhamen’s Mark Diving, snorkeling or trekking the Sinai, where the desert meets the Red Sea

Read Max Rodenbeck’s Cairo: The City Victorious, a fascinating history and first-person travelogue. For true insight into Egyptian culture, nothing tops Naguib Mahfouz’s epic and sometimes ponderous The Cairo Trilogy

Listen to Kulsoum, forever Egypt’s diva

Watch Cleopatra, an over-the-top romp with Elzabeth Taylor and Richard Burton

Eat fuul and taamia-salty fava-bean paste and falafel, rumoured to taste better the lower the hygiene standards. For dessert, try besboussa, asweet, sticky pastry, and kunafa, crispy strands of dough layered over sweet cheese

Drink fresh fruit juice, like mango strawberry and lemon-cheap and delicious. An icy and tonic really does the trick when it’s hot out there

Lnshallah (God willing), an all-purpose disclaimer, as in ‘See you tomorrow at 9, inshallah’

Camela; pyramide; deserts; fazzes; turbans; baksheesh; bushy moustaches; incessant honking; tour guides; tacky King Tut souvenirs

The pyramids at Giza get all the attention,but Egypt boasts dozens of pyramids; visit the massive Bent Pyramid at Dahshur and you might have it all to yourself

ln the decades following Napoleon’s doomed expedition, Egypt attracted attention like no place ever before. During the 1820s,’30s and’40s the country was visited by a stream of adventurers and intrepid early travelers. The resulting accounts and journals were eagerly devoured by Western audiences enraptured by tales of temples in the sand, veiled harems and the bare-breasted of the slave markets.