Arab conquest of Egypt

Forces of the Rashidun Caliphate led by Amr ibn al-As conquered Byzantine Egypt between 639 and 642 AD. The conquest ended the Roman period in Egypt, which had begun in 30 BC and lasted for approximately seven centuries, and more broadly concluded the Greco-Roman period of Egyptian history, which had endured for nearly a millennium.

Prior to the conquest, Byzantine rule in Egypt had undergone significant political and military disruption. The province had been conquered and occupied by the Sasanian Empire for roughly a decade between 618 and 629, before being reconquered by the Byzantines under Emperor Heraclius. These events occurred within the wider context of prolonged conflict between the Byzantine and Sasanian empires that reshaped imperial authority across the eastern Mediterranean in the early seventh century.

By the mid-630s, the Byzantine Empire had also lost control of Syria and its Ghassanid federate allies in Arabia following a series of defeats by the Rashidun Caliphate. The subsequent loss of Egypt—one of the empire’s most economically and strategically important provinces—and the defeat of Byzantine forces further reduced imperial military and fiscal capacity, contributing to additional territorial contraction in the eastern Mediterranean in the centuries that followed.