Egypt, the narrow ribbon of the Nile valley and its delta, sustained one of the longest continuous religious traditions in human history, and then became the crucible of several others. For three thousand years ancient Egyptian religion elaborated its vast pantheon (Ra, Osiris, Isis, Horus, Anubis), its unique preoccupation with the afterlife and the preservation of the body, its temples and priesthoods, and its divine kingship, all bound to the annual miracle of the Nile's flood. The land's later religious importance is distinct and often overlooked: Alexandria, the Greek-founded city of the Nile delta, became in the Hellenistic and Roman periods one of the great intellectual centres of the Mediterranean, and it was there, in a Greek-speaking milieu, that Gnosticism, Hermeticism, and much of Neoplatonism took form, the esoteric and philosophical currents that would feed Western mysticism for two millennia.
Egypt was also a cradle of Christianity: it produced the Desert Fathers and the very institution of monasticism, the catechetical school of Alexandria and theologians like Origen and Athanasius, and the Coptic Church, which endures as one of the oldest Christian bodies. Egypt thus holds two religious identities at once, the ancient Nile religion of gods and the dead, and the Alexandrian ferment of Greek-Egyptian esotericism and early Christianity, laid down on the same ground.