…And in this light the Jews are arguably the oldest steady-state nation, a people, a national identity whose language and religion today and sense of its historic geography are the oldest in the world. I mean, the Jewish language, Hebrew and the Jewish religion are the same today as were alive in the age of the Pharaohs’ whose religion is long gone. The religious language of the 10% of today’s Egypt that is Coptic Christian — the word Coptic being a phonetic cousin of Egypt — descends from the language of the Pharaohs and is surely not the language of Muslims in Egypt today, which is Arabic. Today’s Muslim Egyptians are living on the same country as the ancient Egyptians, but they are another people…