Egypt

Egypt supplies the atlas with the densest concentration of antiquity anywhere and with the engineering that made it possible. Luxor's Karnak took two thousand years and thirty pharaohs; Aswan's quarries cut the granite and still hold an unfinished obelisk cracked in the rock. Cairo is a separate subject — some six hundred registered Islamic monuments, many of them working mosques, with Giza at the edge of the suburbs rather than out in the desert.