The identity

The House of Life.

In ancient Egypt, the Per Ankh — "House of Life" — was the temple institution where scribes trained in writing, record-keeping, medicine, and astronomy. EgyBI is a modern House of Life for Egypt itself: a place where the country is written down, measured, mapped and sourced.

In plain terms: EgyBI is a free encyclopaedia of Egypt told through maps and cited open data. Built solo by Ahmed Nasr, a civil engineer working in data.

Why Egypt

Not a themed skin — Egypt is the subject.

Plenty of sites about a country are written from memory and a stock photo library. EgyBI is written from real pharaohs, real monuments, real tourism figures and real economic series. Read a chart here and you have learned something about the country, not just seen a number styled nicely.

The identity is drawn from real research: Pharaonic color (Egyptian blue and gold), the scribal tradition of Thoth and Seshat, and the monumental Cinzel lettering you see across the site. It's an identity the product earns, not one bolted on.

The knowledge base

One cited database. Five thousand years of Egypt.

Behind every chart, map and story is a single normalised knowledge base that spans the pyramids to the New Administrative Capital — economy, tourism, energy, water, industry, science, sport, culture and more. It grows every week, and not one figure is invented.

0
Cited tables
A normalized relational schema
0
Sourced data rows
Every one traceable to a source
0
Sectors of Egypt
Ancient history to 2026
0
Cited & real
Disputes flagged, never smoothed
Sourced from the primary record

Not blog posts — the institutions that actually publish the numbers. Where two of them disagree, both figures live in the data with the disagreement noted.

Not a data engineer? Come anyway.

A way to actually discover Egypt.

You don't need to write a line of SQL to get something out of EgyBI. Under the puzzles is a genuine, cited portrait of one country across five thousand years — and you can just explore it.

Most of what people "know" about Egypt stops at the pyramids. The real story is far bigger, and it's all here in numbers you can trust: the pharaohs and the dynasties that built the monuments, yes — but also the Suez Canal that still carries a slice of world trade, the Nile that hands 97% of the country its water, the record-breaking new cities and the world's widest bridge, a film industry old enough to be called "Hollywood on the Nile," a squash team that quietly dominates the planet, and a health campaign that made Egypt the first nation cleared by the WHO to eliminate hepatitis C.

Start on the Explore page — real charts and an interactive map of all 27 governorates. Curious how a number was found? Open the page and ask the data yourself. Everything is sourced; where the experts disagree, we show you the disagreement instead of a tidy lie. That's the whole idea: learn Egypt by looking at the evidence.

Your guide

Meet Ibi.

An ibis-headed scribe's apprentice, inspired by Thoth — the god of writing who invented hieroglyphs. Thoth’s job was to write down what was actually counted — including when the count was uncertain, which is the whole of the house style here.

A placeholder mark — a fully illustrated Ibi is on the roadmap.

The non-negotiable rule

Accuracy over polish.

Every dataset is real and cited. Where historians or economists genuinely disagree, EgyBI shows the disagreement rather than picking a tidy number — because handling uncertain, conflicting data is the job of a real data engineer.

Did you know?

Pepi II is traditionally credited with a 94-year reign — the longest in recorded history — per the Turin King List. Most Egyptologists today believe this figure was mistranscribed, and favor a shorter reign closer to 64 years. Both live in the data, flagged.

Turin King List; Egyptological consensus per Beckerath, Chronologie des pharaonischen Ägypten.

That discipline runs through every sector, not just history:

  • Sport: Feryal Ashraf's Tokyo 2020 gold is recorded as karate, not the widely-repeated "taekwondo".
  • Economy: the 2024 IMF programme is stored as the augmented $8bn total, not $8bn of new money.
  • Energy: every green-hydrogen "mega-deal" is flagged as a non-binding MoU — because only one has reached a real offtake agreement.
  • Water: GERD downstream-loss figures are marked as contested Egyptian-source scenario models, presented neutrally.
  • Infrastructure: the record bridge is logged under its true Guinness category — "widest cable-stayed", not "suspension".

Content is original: the reading list points to real books (Kimball, Kleppmann, and more), but every exercise is written from scratch — never copied. And the datasets are public and legally clean, including the Met Museum's CC0-licensed Egyptian collection.

Come into the House of Life.

Open the Atlas and find your way around Egypt, or subscribe to The Papyrus and get one sourced story a month.

Medu netjer — the words of the gods

The signs we use, and what they actually mean.

These are real Egyptian signs, not ornament. Each one appears somewhere on the site for a reason, and each is listed here with its name, its sound where it has one, and its Gardiner code — the standard catalogue Egyptologists use. The ancient Egyptians called their own script medu netjer, the words of the gods, and their country Kemet, the black land, after the dark silt the Nile left behind.

Signs are drawn from the Unicode Egyptian Hieroglyphs block (U+13000–U+1342F). Because most phones and Macs ship no font covering that block, we load a small subset of Noto Sans Egyptian Hieroglyphs so they render for everyone rather than appearing as empty boxes.