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Egypt does not write the governorate on its number plates in any form you can read, so the name in a round comes off a road sign, a government building or the landscape itself. That leaves the hard half of the question: where is that governorate? This page is all 27 of them, grouped the way Egypt's own statistics group them, and the game asks you to put each name on the map.
Egypt is run as governorates, muhafazat in Arabic, each under a governor the
president appoints rather than one anybody elects. There have been 27 since 2011,
when two short-lived ones were folded back into Cairo and Giza, and the newest of
them is Luxor, split off from Qena in 2009.
The map they make is the strangest in this catalogue, and the reason is the one fact everybody already knows about Egypt. Almost the whole population lives on the Nile and in its Delta, which is a few per cent of the country, so the governorates that hold nearly all the people are the small ones crowded into the north and along the river, and the four that hold almost nobody are enormous. New Valley alone is bigger than every Delta governorate put together, several times over.
Learning the names is unusually cheap here, because most of them are not proper names at all. A governorate is normally called after its capital, so the town on the sign in front of you is often the answer: Damietta, Aswan, Asyut, Sohag, Qena, Minya, Beni Suef, Faiyum, Luxor, Ismailia, Port Said and Suez all work that way. Most of the rest are plain Arabic descriptions of where they are, which is worth knowing even if you do not read the script: Gharbia is "the western one", Sharqia "the eastern one", Beheira "the lake", the Red Sea and the New Valley say what they are, and North and South Sinai need no translating at all.
Turn on the local name in the start dialog and the game asks in Arabic instead,
which is the form on every sign, plate and ministry board in the country. The
word you will see missing from each of them is muhafazat, the "governorate" a
sign usually puts in front: the map labels the name itself, the way its English
labels say Cairo rather than Cairo Governorate.
The traps are almost all names, and there are three kinds.
Capitals that are not their governorate's namesake. Tanta is in Gharbia, Zagazig in Sharqia, Mansoura in Dakahlia, Banha in Qalyubia, Shibin el-Kom in Monufia and Damanhur in Beheira. In the desert it happens again: Hurghada is the capital of the Red Sea, Kharga of the New Valley, Arish of North Sinai and Marsa Matrouh of Matrouh. Six of the nine Delta governorates and four of the five frontier ones are named after something other than their biggest town, and the Delta six are exactly the ones whose names are directions instead.
The famous place that is in the next governorate along. The pyramids are in Giza and not Cairo, which is the one everybody gets wrong. Sharm el-Sheikh and Dahab are in South Sinai, whose capital is the much quieter el-Tor. Marsa Alam is in the Red Sea governorate, hundreds of kilometres south of Hurghada. Siwa is in Matrouh, five hundred kilometres from the sea the governorate is named for. Abu Simbel is in Aswan, almost on the Sudanese border.
Names that start the same way. Beni Suef and Beheira, Qena and Qalyubia, Sohag and Suez, Minya and Monufia: in each pair one is in the Delta and the other in the valley or on the canal, which is the fastest way to keep them apart.
Those four are how Egypt reports itself. The census, the labour force survey, the health survey and the budget are all published against them, which makes this the one grouping an Egyptian reader would recognise without being told. Each can be switched on and off on its own in the game's start dialog, so the frontier is a five governorate drill and the urban four are a four.
Two of the four need a note. Urban is not a size category: those are the governorates that are only a city, with no rural districts under them at all, which is why Suez is in it and much larger Damietta is not. Frontier is the other four fifths of Egypt, five governorates holding a couple of per cent of the population between them, and it is the group to drill first: they are enormous, they have unmistakable shapes, and getting them right leaves the whole of the crowded part of the map as the only thing left to learn.
Giza: the Pyramids, the Sphinx and Saqqara are all here rather than in Cairo, which is the governorate on the other bank. On the map it is the wedge running west from the Nile opposite Cairo and then far out into the Western Desert, so it is both a crowded suburb of the capital and an empty quarter of the Sahara. Its plates are the one Egyptian giveaway of this kind: Giza issues two letters where every other governorate issues three.
Luxor: a short stretch of the valley around the ancient city, cut out of Qena in 2009 to run the tourism on its own. On the map it is the small block between Qena above it and Aswan below, and it is the target here you are most likely to miss by tapping rather than by not knowing, so zoom in before you commit. Everything a round is likely to show you of it, the Valley of the Kings, Karnak and the corniche, is within a few kilometres of the river.
New Valley: the largest governorate in Egypt by a very wide margin, filling the entire south west of the country, and home to well under one per cent of its people. What is in it is the string of oases, Kharga, Dakhla and Farafra, and the roads between them. If a round drops you on a desert highway with nothing but sand, escarpment and the occasional palm plantation, and you are anywhere south or west of Faiyum, this is the safest name on the map.
27. The number has been steady since 2011, when Helwan and 6th of October were abolished and their land went back to Cairo and Giza. The newest one still standing is Luxor, separated from Qena in 2009. Each is run by a governor appointed by the president, and Egypt's own statistics sort the 27 into four groups: the urban governorates, Lower Egypt, Upper Egypt and the frontier.
Upper Egypt is the south and Lower Egypt is the north, which catches out almost everybody the first time. The names are the river's rather than the map's: the Nile rises in the south and flows north to the Mediterranean, so upstream is upper. Lower Egypt is the Delta, Upper Egypt is the valley from Giza south to Aswan, and the two have been named this way since the pharaohs.
Not in a form you can read off as a name. The current plate, in use since 2008, carries Egypt in Arabic and English along the top and then Arabic numerals and letters, and the letters encode the traffic department that issued it rather than spelling anything out. Two counts do give something away: Cairo issues three digits where everywhere else issues four, and Giza issues two letters where everywhere else issues three. Beyond those, the plate tells you the country and the vehicle class, and the governorate has to come from a sign.
Giza, not Cairo. The Giza plateau is on the west bank of the Nile and Cairo governorate is on the east, so the pyramids, the Sphinx and the older step pyramid at Saqqara are all in Giza. Giza also runs west into the Western Desert for hundreds of kilometres, which makes it one of the larger governorates as well as one of the most crowded.
New Valley is the largest by a long way, covering the south west of the country and roughly two fifths of Egypt on its own, with the Red Sea and Matrouh next. Damietta, on the coast at the eastern mouth of the Nile, is the smallest. Population runs the other way: the frontier governorates together hold a couple of per cent of Egyptians, while Cairo and Giza between them hold something closer to a fifth.
Three, in order from the Mediterranean to the Red Sea: Port Said at the northern entrance, Ismailia in the middle where the canal meets Lake Timsah, and Suez at the southern end. Two of the three are urban governorates, and Ismailia is counted with Lower Egypt. North and South Sinai are across the canal to the east, which is the boundary between Africa and Asia running through the middle of the map.
The top tier of local government, called a muhafazah in Arabic. A governor is appointed by the president and runs it, and most governorates are divided further into markaz districts, each with a town at its centre. The four urban governorates are the exception: Cairo, Alexandria, Port Said and Suez are cities governed as governorates, with no rural districts under them, which is what puts them in a class of their own rather than their size.
The other African trainers here are Kenya Counties, Nigeria States, South Africa Provinces and South Africa Dialing Codes. For administrative maps that work the same way, try Turkey Provinces, India States and Spain Provinces.
