The issue of the decline of the Egyptian civilisation has occupied many people and raised many questions so researchers have taken different approaches to explain this collapse.

As a researcher in Egyptian history, I present here the summary of my knowledge and conclusions based on the sequence of historical events up to the present day to answer the puzzling question: Why did ancient Egyptian civilization decline?

There is a major turning point in human history that coincides with the exodus of the Israelites from Egypt. Let us say that this transformation began around 1500 BC, and was characterized by the gradual weakening of Egypt in its first stage.

The date of the exodus is one of the key controversies of Old Testament study. Generally speaking, conservative scholars place the event in the 15th century B.C., while liberal writers contend that the departure from Egypt occurred some 200 years later.

First Kings 6:1 reveals that from the time of the exodus to the first year of construction on Solomon’s temple (966 B.C.), was a period of 480 years.

The empire located on the Nile River reached the peak of its power, wealth and influence in the era of the New Kingdom (1550 to 1070 BC), during the reign of iconic pharaohs such as Tutankhamun, Thutmose III and Ramses II, who may have been the pharaoh mentioned in the story of the Exodus in the Bible.

At its height, the Egyptian Empire controlled a vast territory stretching from modern Egypt across the northern Sinai Peninsula and into the ancient land of Canaan which includes modern Israel, the West Bank, Gaza, Jordan, and the southern parts of Syria and Lebanon.

But beginning with the murder of Ramesses III in 1155 BCE, the great Egyptian empire began to slowly collapse due to centuries-long drought, economic crises, and opportunistic foreign invaders.

After the New Kingdom, Egypt was ruled by a series of foreign powers, further evidence of its decline as an independent empire. However, the first invaders already existed as enemies of Egypt in the ancient world.

First came the Libyans, a nomadic people from Egypt’s western borders, whose influence and culture gradually took over the seats of power. Shoshenq I, a pharaoh of Libyan origin, was the first pharaoh of the Twenty-second Dynasty, who attempted to restore the glory days of Ramesses III by conquering the kingdoms of Israel and Judah in the 10th century BCE.

Then in the 8th century BCE, the Nubians, or Kushites, peacefully seized the Egyptian throne during a period of political turmoil. A series of Kushite pharaohs ruled Egypt for nearly a century as the Twenty-fifth Dynasty before being driven out by Assyrian invaders.

Once the Kushite kings took power, it was the end of Egypt as an independent power. “Then came the Assyrians, followed by the Persians, the Greeks, the Romans, and then Islam. If you talk about ancient Egypt as a power in its own right and ruled by Egyptians, it will never be the same again.”

During this period of collapse of the original Egyptian rule, new civilizations gradually began to emerge. In Europe, we see the rise of Greek and then Roman civilizations.

Egypt saw its last moments of greatness under the Ptolemaic Dynasty (305 to 30 BC), a dynasty of Greek-Macedonian pharaohs who ruled Egypt after the death of Alexander the Great. The most famous of the Ptolemaic pharaohs was Cleopatra VII, who built a magnificent Hellenistic capital in Alexandria.

When the Roman Emperor Octavian (Augustus) defeated Cleopatra and Mark Antony in 30 BC, Egypt became a province of the Roman Republic, bringing an end to the last ancient Egyptian dynasty.

The rise of Persian civilization in Asia coincided with the rise of European civilization.

The emergence of new civilizations had a very serious impact on ancient Egyptian civilization. The Greeks, Persians, and Romans invaded Egypt. The successive blows that Egypt suffered led to the complete loss of its Egyptian identity.

Before 1300 BC, ancient Egyptian civilization was able to digest its enemies and rearrange its cards again, and this character continued until the Roman occupation. However, Egypt's power dissipated in the periods following this invasion, and only limited glimpses remained in Egypt that remind us of the time of the pharaohs, the owners of advanced civilization.

The great empire on the banks of the Nile slowly collapsed due to centuries-long drought, economic crises, and opportunistic foreign invaders. However, two other factors continued to collapse ancient Egyptian civilization.

The first factor is the absence of the original Egyptian rule that extended for more than 2000 years. Is it a curse?

The second factor is that the invaders changed everything related to the ancient Egyptian religion, such as religion and language, which brought back to mind the original principles of civilization.