๐ How Rare Are You in Egypt?
๐ช๐ฌ Genetic Landscape of Egypt
Egypt sits at the crossroads of Africa, the Middle East, and the Mediterranean, creating a unique genetic profile. Modern Egyptians carry Ancient Egyptian, Arab, Berber, Turkish, and Sub-Saharan African ancestry. The Nile Valley has been a genetic melting pot for 7,000+ years. Surprisingly, genetic studies show modern Egyptians share significant DNA with ancient mummies. Upper Egypt (south) shows more Sub-Saharan influence, while the Delta region and Alexandria show more Mediterranean traits.
Almost everyone lives on the narrow ribbon of irrigated land beside the Nile and in the Delta, with desert on either side, so standing out here is often a matter of address as much as ancestry. A family from Siwa, the oasis out near the Libyan border, grows up inside a different linguistic world from a family in Port Said. Alexandria spent much of its modern history as a Mediterranean port with Greek, Italian, Armenian and Levantine quarters, and some family names there still carry that. In Sinai and the Western Desert, Bedouin tribal affiliation organises identity in a way it simply does not in Cairo. The Coptic Christian community, for its part, keeps its own calendar, saints' days and stock of given names.
๐ชช The Card, the Number and the Dash
Egypt's national identity card is governed by Law No. 143 of 1994 on Civil Status, which requires every citizen aged 15 and over to obtain and carry one. Its printed fields include full name, date of birth, gender, religion, residence address, issuing office, profession and, for women, the husband's name. The 14-digit national number is not arbitrary either. The first digit is the century of birth, the next six the date of birth, the next two the province of birth, then a four-digit serial and a check digit.
Three religions were officially acceptable entries on that line: Islam, Christianity or Judaism. The documents are mandatory, and they are what you need for education, employment, a bank account, a driving licence, a pension or an inheritance โ so Egyptians whose faith was not on the list could be left without them. Baha'is were, for nine years. Interior Ministry decree no. 520/2009, signed on 19 March 2009, published in the Official Gazette on 14 April and in force the next day, told officials to put a dash where the religion would go. The record is exact about some things and, since then, deliberately blank about one.
๐๏ธ Eye Color
| Brown | 75% |
| Dark Brown | 15% |
| Hazel | 5% |
| Green | 3% |
| Blue | 2% |
๐ Hair Color
| Black | 60% |
| Dark Brown | 30% |
| Brown | 7% |
| Other | 3% |
๐ฉธ Blood Type
| O+ | 33% |
| A+ | 28% |
| B+ | 23% |
| AB+ | 6% |
| O- | 4% |
| A- | 3% |
| B- | 2% |
| AB- | 1% |
Trait frequencies on this page come from public and institutional datasets โ see Data Sources.
🧮 Calculate Your Rarity in Egypt
Pick your eye colour, hair colour and blood type. The calculator uses Egypt's own figures from the tables above, not world averages.
This is an estimate, not a measurement. It multiplies three national frequencies as if they were independent, and they are not: eye and hair colour share pigmentation genes, so a combination that tends to run together, such as blue eyes with blonde hair, is more common than the multiplication suggests, while one that rarely does, such as blue eyes with black hair, is rarer. Blood type is independent of both. The frequencies are national averages from public datasets — see Data Sources.
That number describes the body you were born with. Fraeon, our other site, does the same arithmetic for the part you chose: the films, series, games, books, anime and manga you have actually finished. Start your log →
๐ Three Calendars Running at Once
A birthday is the unit this site counts in, and in Egypt one birthday can be written three ways. The Gregorian year runs the paperwork. The Hijri year is settled by looking: Dar al-Ifta, an Egyptian governmental body for religious rulings headed by the Grand Mufti, treats fixing the start and end of each lunar month as one of its key responsibilities. Seven committees drawn from various government bodies, among them Islamic scholars and astronomers, observe on the 29th of each lunar month from locations that have to be dry and devoid of dust or other hindrances. The Grand Mufti analyses what they report and announces the beginning of the new month.
The third is the Coptic calendar, counted from 29 August 284 AD and written A.M., for the Year of the Martyrs. It runs 13 months: twelve of 30 days and a short intercalary one of five days, six in a leap year. Its new year, the Feast of Neyrouz, coincides with 11 September through 1900 to 2099, or 12 September before a leap year. It is not only a church calendar โ it is still in use all over Egypt by farmers keeping track of the agricultural seasons.
๐ค One Letter, Two Spellings of the Same Name
The Arabic letter jim (ุฌ) is read as a hard g in Egypt โ the g of "go". That is the prestigious and most common reading in the country, though southern Egypt goes the other way, and Egyptians use the letter for that sound in names and in loanwords: ุฌููู is "golf". Elsewhere the same letter is the j of "jam" across much of the Arabian Peninsula and in Iraq, and the s of "measure" in the urban Levant and most of northwestern Africa. The hard g otherwise turns up in coastal Yemen and in southwestern and eastern Oman. None of these is a mistake. They are readings of one letter.
It matters here because the letter eventually has to leave the Arabic alphabet. The name ุฌู ุงู is one name in Arabic, but its recorded pronunciations split by region โ [ษกรฆหmรฆหl] in Egypt, [dสaหmaหl] in the Hejaz and Najd, [สaหmaหl] in the Levant โ and the Latin spellings split with them. Egypt's second president signed his name Gamal; the same Arabic name is written Jamal or Djamel elsewhere. One name in Arabic, several separate entries in any system that sorts by spelling. So "how many people share my name" gets a different answer depending on which script you ask it in. Our name rarity page counts spellings, not sounds.
โญ Rare Facts About Egypt
Where the numbers on this page come from
Population: CAPMAS, the official statistical agency that runs Egypt's census. The last census had census day 18 April 2017, with the population on that date put at 94,798,827. The rounded 106M in the tiles above is not that count, and we have not traced it to a CAPMAS release. Height: a modelled estimate from the NCD Risk Factor Collaboration's 2016 eLife pooled analysis of 1,472 studies, not a direct national measurement. Blood: a 2019 study of 40,591 Egyptian blood donors, not a national count โ and it puts A (35.12%) ahead of O (31.94%), which disagrees with the tile above. Eye and hair colour: the national ID card records no field describing appearance, and we have no official Egyptian count for either, so those tables are estimates. Last checked September 2026.