Data stories
Egypt, argued from the map.
Three stories where the map moves as you read. Every figure below is computed in your browser from the data in this repository, so the numbers in the prose cannot drift away from their source. Scroll, or press Tab to walk the steps by keyboard.
Half of Egypt lives on a fortieth of it.
The country is enormous and almost all of it is empty. Here is what that means for where you will actually go.
Egypt is mostly empty
Egypt covers — square kilometres and holds — people. Both numbers are true, and together they mislead: the population is not spread across the country, it is pressed into a thin strip beside one river and one delta.
Half the country, on a rounding error of land
Rank the governorates by density and add them up. Half of everyone in Egypt lives in the — densest, which together are — of the land area.
That is the Nile valley and the Delta, in blue. If you visit Egypt, almost everything you will see is inside this shape.
And the rest
Now the opposite end. — governorates hold under 25 people per square kilometre. They are — of Egypt's land and — of its people.
This is the Western Desert, Sinai and the Red Sea coast — in gold. Larger than most European countries, and nearly nobody lives there.
The shape of the country
Put them together and Egypt's real geography appears: a blue ribbon of people, a gold expanse of almost nobody, and very little in between.
Every road, every city and nearly every ancient site in this encyclopaedia sits on the blue. That is not a metaphor — it is what the density data says.
Sources. Governorate boundaries: geoBoundaries EGY ADM1 (CC BY 4.0). Population, area and density attributes: CAPMAS figures bundled with those boundaries. Percentages are computed in the browser from those attributes. What this cannot tell you: governorate averages hide everything inside them — Giza spans both dense city and open desert, and a single density figure flattens that.
This is not a map of hospitals.
It is a map of where people have done the mapping — and telling the difference is the most useful skill for reading any open dataset about Egypt.
A map of hospitals, or a map of mappers?
The Atlas plots — health facilities across Egypt, as recorded in OpenStreetMap on —. It is tempting to read that as a map of healthcare. It is not, and the numbers show why.
Facilities per million people
Divide the mapped facilities in each governorate by its population and colour the map. If this measured healthcare, you would expect the pattern to follow population, wealth or urbanisation.
It follows none of them.
The top of the range
— comes out highest, at — mapped facilities per million residents.
It is also where the dive resorts are. Tourist regions attract visiting mappers, and visiting mappers add detail. What is high here is the mapping, not necessarily the medicine.
The bottom of it
— comes out lowest, at — per million — a spread of — from top to bottom.
It is a densely populated agricultural governorate with millions of residents. It certainly has clinics. They are simply not in OpenStreetMap yet.
So read this layer as a map of where volunteers have been, not where Egyptians can get treatment. That is the honest reading, and it is why this figure never appears on the site without that caveat attached.
Sources. Facilities: OpenStreetMap via Overpass (ODbL), as dated above. Population: CAPMAS attributes on the bundled geoBoundaries outlines (CC BY 4.0). What this cannot tell you: nothing here counts Egypt's actual hospitals, beds, staff or opening hours. A governorate with few mapped facilities may be well served and poorly mapped, and this data cannot separate the two.
Every planning era leaves a fingerprint you can measure.
Street geometry is one of the few things about a city you can measure objectively from open data. Here is what a century of Egyptian plans looks like in numbers.
A century of plans, measured
EgyBI measures the street geometry of — Egyptian districts spanning the 1860s to the 2020s, from OpenStreetMap on —. Intersection density, dead-end share, circuity and orientation entropy are computed the way a highway engineer would, then normalised per square kilometre.
The oldest fabric
Downtown Cairo, laid out for Khedive Ismail in the 1860s, is the densest network measured here. Short blocks, many junctions, walkable by construction rather than by policy.
Its boundary is the one hand-drawn extent on the site, because OpenStreetMap has no polygon for Downtown Cairo at all — and it is labelled as hand-drawn everywhere it appears.
The newest
The desert cities invert it. Longer segments, fewer junctions per square kilometre, higher circuity — the distance you actually travel versus the straight line.
The spread between the densest and sparsest district measured is —: — at — intersections per square kilometre against — at —.
What the geometry cannot tell you
None of this says which district is better to live in. A cul-de-sac layout is quieter on your own street and harder to cross on foot; both are true at once, and the geometry measures the trade-off without resolving it.
It also says nothing about pavement quality, traffic, safety or whether the street is pleasant. Those are not in the data, so they are not in the conclusion.
Sources. Street networks: OpenStreetMap via OSMnx (ODbL), as dated above. Metrics computed on graphs projected to UTM and normalised per square kilometre. Hand-drawn boundaries in this story: —. What this cannot tell you: geometry is not quality. These figures say nothing about pavement condition, traffic, safety or whether a street is pleasant to walk down, and no conclusion here depends on them.
This is not a map of ancient Egypt.
It is a map of where ancient Egypt has been recorded. Those are different countries, and the difference is the story.
— sites, and the shape they make
Every dot is an archaeological site with a name and a position in OpenStreetMap, as of —. They fall where you would expect: along the river, around the Delta, out to the oases and down the Red Sea coast.
Read as a map of antiquity that is unremarkable. Read as a map of survey effort it is the most interesting thing in this gazetteer.
Luxor: — sites in — km²
Egypt's smallest governorate carries more mapped ancient sites than any other — — per thousand square kilometres. Thebes was a capital, so there is genuinely a great deal there.
There is also a century and a half of excavation, a tourism economy that depends on knowing exactly what is where, and more people writing it into OpenStreetMap than anywhere else in the country. All three produce dots. The map cannot separate them.
New Valley: — sites, on — of Egypt
The Western Desert governorate is — times the size of Luxor and has almost as many recorded sites — — per thousand square kilometres, against Luxor's —.
That ratio is not a statement about how much is buried in the desert. Nobody knows that number. It is a statement about how much of the desert anyone has walked over with a GPS.
—: — people, zero sites
In the middle of the Delta, on land farmed and settled continuously for thousands of years, this gazetteer records no archaeological site at all.
That is not a claim about the Delta. It is a claim about the map — and the dataset makes it about itself, in its own words: —
Delta sites sit under farmland, canals and modern cities. They are harder to see, harder to survey and harder to tag than a temple standing in the open at Luxor. A dot means someone recorded something. No dot means nobody has.
Sources. Archaeological sites: OpenStreetMap via Overpass
(historic=archaeological_site with a name), fetched
—, ODbL. Governorate boundaries, areas and populations:
geoBoundaries EGY ADM1 (CC BY 4.0) with CAPMAS attributes. Every count, density and ratio on
this page is computed in the browser from those two files.
What this cannot tell you: anything about how much archaeology exists. A site
is counted here only if someone has recorded it in OpenStreetMap with a name, so the entire
story is about recording. Assigning a site to a governorate uses the simplified boundaries, so
a site near a border may be counted on the wrong side.