And on the pedestal, these words appear:
My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings;
Look on my Works, ye Mighty, and despair!
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal Wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s immortal poem “Ozymandias” describes the long-ruined statue of a boastful pharaoh in the Sahara desert, reflecting a once proud empire that decayed. Even as the pharaoh’s statue declares his grandeur, he has nothing to be proud about. His great accomplishments have been reduced to nothing, regardless of how big his ego was.

Shelley was describing an Egyptian pharaoh of thousands of years ago, but it could also apply today. While trying to prop up Egypt as a regional power, President Abdel Fattah el-Sisi faces crises on all sides, which threaten to erase his legacy. Like the ancient Israelite slaves under the whip of their Egyptian masters, the Egyptian people today want dramatic change. Soon they will get it.

Financial Exodus

Close to 30 percent of Egypt’s 111 million people live below the poverty line. As of last year, over 70 percent rely on government-subsidized bread. The World Health Organization estimated in 2021 that more than 1 in 5 Egyptian children has stunted growth due to malnourishment. Egypt is the second-largest debtor state to the International Monetary Fund, owing the bank roughly $15 billion to keep its economy afloat.

Part of the reason for the people’s struggle is the instability of the Egyptian pound. In April, the International Monetary Fund estimated Egypt’s inflation rate—roughly 32.5 percent—to be the ninth-highest in the world. That’s worse than perennial economically shaky countries like Haiti and Bangladesh. But it’s an improvement from 2023. Last August, Egypt hit its all-time record of 39.7 percent inflation. The New York Times’ Cairo bureau chief wrote in January:

Grocery prices are stratospheric. Money is worth half of what it was a year ago. For many, eggs are now a luxury and meat is off the table. For others, burdened with school fees and medical expenses, the middle-class lives they had worked doggedly to sustain are slipping beyond their grasp.

Inflation doesn’t happen in a vacuum. For the past several years, crises have hit Egypt one after another.

A Plague Upon Pharaoh

Aside from the land around the Nile River, most of Egypt is barren desert inconducive to economic productivity. But these deserts also preserve Egypt’s ancient past—its tombs, temples and mummies. This history brings Egypt an economic lifeline: tourists. In 2019, Egypt received a record 13 million tourists. The United States Agency for International Development estimates tourism accounts for 10 to 15 percent of Egypt’s economy. The tourist industry provides Egypt with roughly 10 percent of its jobs.

But as 2019 came to a close, the coronavirus from China began to spread, shutting down the global travel industry. The number of tourists who visited Egypt in 2020 dropped—from 13 million to roughly 3.6 million. The 2020–2021 fiscal year saw Egypt’s tourism revenue drop nearly 70 percent.

Probably related to its reliance on tourism, Egypt had a relatively short lockdown. Tourist numbers today are close to what they were in 2019, but covid-19 was not the only global event to rattle Egypt’s tourist industry. Another came in 2022, which impacted more than the level of crowds at the pyramids.

A Famine in Egypt

Before 2022, about a third of Egypt’s tourists came from two countries: Russia and Ukraine. When Russian President Vladimir Putin invaded Ukraine, that source of tourists dried up. But Russia and Ukraine provide something even more valuable to Egypt than tourists: wheat.

The land around the Nile River is extremely fertile and has supported strong empires for millenniums. Anciently, Egypt was the breadbasket of the Roman Empire. But most of those empires didn’t host 111 million people. Roughly 96 percent of modern Egypt’s land is desert. To feed its people, the Egyptian government has resorted to mass imports. Egypt competes with China for the title of the world’s biggest wheat importer. In 2022, Egypt imported roughly $4.8 billion-worth of wheat—over 6.5 percent of the world’s exports.

One reason Egypt relies on wheat so much is for its bread subsidy program. The allowance, which includes five loaves per day, amounted to almost 2 percent of public spending as of 2021. Egypt has had some kind of bread subsidy program since the 1910s, when it was a British protectorate.

In 2021, Russia was the world’s largest exporter of wheat, responsible for 17 percent of global exports. Ukraine, at 10 percent, was the fifth largest. Their productivity and relative proximity made them logical partners to Egypt. Both countries are still exporting wheat, but the shock waves of the war have caused bread prices to skyrocket. Since 2022, Russia has disrupted Ukraine’s exports through the Black Sea to further its own goals. Last year, Russia backed out of a grain deal, targeting ships from Ukraine’s Black Sea ports.

“The Russians think if they can disrupt global food supplies and threaten to starve enough people, it will convince the West to drop sanctions against them and they will be better able to fund their war on Ukraine,” Trumpet contributing editor Jeremiah Jacques wrote at the time. Russia admitted this. “All our hope is in the famine,” Margarita Simonyan, editor in chief of state-run RT said. “The famine will start now, and they will lift the sanctions, and be friends with us, because they will realize it is necessary.”

Russia caused this crisis to hurt countries dependent on grain imports. Egypt is at the top of the list.

Ukraine was able to resume grain exports this year. But Egypt is still feeling the effects. On June 1, the Egyptian government quadrupled the price of subsidized bread in a cost-saving measure. Even if this could cushion the economy’s fall, it’s not scoring any popularity points. President Anwar Sadat tried to raise the price in 1977 but backed down after massive riots.

2023 brought another crisis to Egypt—one that hit much closer to home.

Parting of the Red Sea

On Oct. 7, 2023, Hamas invaded Israel from Gaza, murdered roughly 1,200 people, and abducted over 200 more. Israel retaliated by invading Gaza. While the world focuses on the war, the impact on Egypt is less apparent.

When Hamas’s paymaster, Iran, activated another of its proxies in the war against Israel, Yemen’s Houthi movement began targeting commercial shipping in the Bab el-Mandeb strait, the Red Sea’s southern choke point.

Israel’s Red Sea port of Eilat has received less traffic due to the Houthis’ attacks. But Israel is not the Red Sea’s most vulnerable customer: Egypt is. Egypt depends on the Suez Canal for much-needed foreign revenue. But the Suez Canal is useless if ships can’t use the Bab el-Mandeb. Many Western shipping giants, even with American security guarantees, are sailing their ships around South Africa for safety.

The Houthis declared their campaign of disruption in November. Egypt began to feel the effects immediately. On January 11, Suez Canal Authority head Osama Rabie claimed revenues for 2024 were already down 40 percent from the equivalent time last year. In May, Egypt’s revenue from the Suez Canal dropped to $337.8 million, compared to the $648 million in May of 2023—a 47.8 percent drop.

For the 2022–2023 fiscal year, the Suez Canal contributed 2 percent of Egypt’s gross domestic product. While Israel is slowly making ground in its Gaza invasion, the Houthis and Iran’s other proxies say they won’t stop their campaigns until Israel backs down. The war is now approaching its one-year anniversary, and the Houthis’ attacks show no sign of ceasing.

Pharaoh’s Treasure Cities

How is Sisi responding to these crises? Surprisingly, vanity projects are among his spending priorities. The chief of these is a new city in the Sahara to replace Cairo as Egypt’s capital.

Sisi came to power in the fallout of a military coup in 2014. In 2015, his government announced the construction of the New Administrative Capital (nac). The official reason for replacing its centuries-old capital on the Nile is that metropolitan Cairo, at over 22 million people, has become too congested to function as a capital of a modern nation. Some analysts suspect the real reason is protection from revolution. When the Arab Spring hit Egypt in 2011, President Hosni Mubarak was surrounded by millions of revolutionaries. Once the nac is completed, if another revolution hits, Sisi will have a barrier between himself and potentially rowdy Cairo.

The expected final construction fee is $58 billion. The furnishings include the Cathedral of the Nativity of Christ for Egypt’s Coptic Christian minority—the largest cathedral in the Middle East. The capital’s Grand Mosque is the second-largest in Africa. Its Iconic Tower skyscraper is the largest in Africa. And for the military (which is the majority owner of the city’s development company), Sisi built the Octagon, the largest defense headquarters in the world—about seven times the size of America’s Pentagon.

Sisi claims he hopes for people to move en masse to the new capital. But with low-end apartments having an $80,000 price tag, life in the nac is out of reach for most Egyptians.

The nac isn’t Sisi’s only vanity project. The $1 billion Grand Egyptian Museum in Giza is the largest archaeological museum in the world (yet to open). The Rod El Farag Bridge, the world’s widest suspension bridge, was also built under Sisi’s watch. An $8 billion expansion of the Suez Canal, meanwhile, failed to bring any meaningful increase in revenue, even before the Houthis started their shooting spree.

These kinds of megaprojects bring some job opportunities and encourage some foreign investment, but with an economy as battered as Egypt’s, is the extravagance and grandiosity really necessary? Does Egypt need the world’s largest defense headquarters when tens of millions of Egyptians can’t afford to buy bread? Most Egyptians know these projects aren’t about jump-starting the economy.

“None of this is for us,” Mohammed Mahmoud, a nac construction worker, told the New York Times in 2020. Mahmoud gestured at the marble-fronted cityscape he helped build, then pointed to a billboard featuring Sisi. “It’s for him.”

The Decay of That Colossal Wreck

As Egypt is assaulted by crises, President Sisi seems busy stoking his ego with Pharaonic building projects.

This kind of top-heavy extravagance stirred revolution against Hosni Mubarak in 2011. Lavish spending while the public starved led the people of Iran to uproot the shah in the 1979 Islamic Revolution. In both cases, a dictatorial Islamist government resulted.

The Trumpet expects such an Islamic revolution to happen soon in Egypt.

It’s not hard to see how this could come about. Iran is the number one sponsor of terrorism in the Middle East. Hamas, the Houthis, Hezbollah, al-Shabaab and many other notorious terrorist groups trace funding, weapons and even leadership to Iran. Through the Houthis especially, Iran has demonstrated great capacity to hurt Egypt through its proxy empire. Evidence suggests Iran even helped assassinate Egyptian President Anwar Sadat in 1981. Animosity between Egypt’s military regime and the Islamic Republic has existed for decades.

Egypt today is weak. Many of the circumstances around this are outside of the government’s control. But Egyptians are getting fed up with their government and want change. Iran meanwhile is always ready to export its Islamic revolution. It did so in Iraq, Yemen, Lebanon and elsewhere.

Egypt’s dominant Islamist faction, the Muslim Brotherhood, isn’t popular. A 2023 poll by the Washington Institute for Near East Policy suggests a mere 11 percent of Egyptians view the Muslim Brotherhood positively. But the same poll suggests 75 percent of Egyptians see Hamas positively since the October 7 massacre. Ninety-seven percent stated Arab states should “immediately sever all diplomatic, political, economic and any other contacts with Israel, in protest against its military action in Gaza.” Right now, to most Egyptians, Iran’s Islamist proxy in Gaza looks like the hero; meanwhile, Egypt’s own military regime, the first Arab government to recognize Israel in 1978, plays the part of a collaborator with the enemy.

There is a more important reason the Trumpet watches Egypt: Bible prophecy.

‘Egypt Shall Not Escape’

Daniel 11 records a prophecy for “the time of the end.” “And at the time of the end shall the king of the south push at him: and the king of the north shall come against him like a whirlwind, with chariots, and with horsemen, and with many ships; and he shall enter into the countries, and shall overflow and pass over. He shall enter also into the glorious land, and many countries shall be overthrown: but these shall escape out of his hand, even Edom, and Moab, and the chief of the children of Ammon. He shall stretch forth his hand also upon the countries: and the land of Egypt shall not escape. But he shall have power over the treasures of gold and of silver, and over all the precious things of Egypt: and the Libyans and the Ethiopians shall be at his steps” (verses 40-43).

This is a prophecy of two power blocs under the names “the king of the north” and “the king of the south.” The “glorious land,” or the land of Israel, is the reference point. Biblical and secular history show the bloc from Israel’s north to be a united European power. (Request a free copy of History and Prophecy of the Middle East for more information.)

The king of the south has a “pushy,” provocative foreign policy aimed against the West. It has a proxy empire controlling large areas of the Middle East and Africa. Since the 1990s, Trumpet editor in chief Gerald Flurry has identified the king of the south as radical Islam, led by Iran. He writes in The King of the South:

Egypt will be conquered or controlled by the king of the north. This clearly implies that Egypt will be allied with the king of the south.

This prophecy indicates we are about to see a far-reaching change in Egyptian politics! We have been saying since 1994 that this would occur. Look at Egypt today, and you see the nation’s foreign policy and political orientation changing in a way that threatens to transform the entire region!

Egypt is ready for this revolution right now. The crises have created Egypt’s perfect storm.

How does this concern the rest of the world? The prophecy leads into Daniel 12:1, which describes a global “time of trouble, such as never was since there was a nation even to that same time ….” These events in the Middle East will engulf the whole world.

This doesn’t mean there is no cause for hope. The prophecy continues: “[A]nd at that time thy people shall be delivered, every one that shall be found written in the book.” God promises protection to those who truly follow Him. The same Bible that prophesies of the clash between the king of the south and the king of the north prophesies of the wonderful world to come after this time of trouble. But the onus is on us to respond and repent—before these prophecies come to pass.