Enough chronology to make sense of what your guide is telling you.
The single most useful fact: Cleopatra lived closer in time to the moon landing than to the building of the Great Pyramid. Egyptian history is not one period, it is dozens, and the gaps between them are longer than most countries have existed.
The Old Kingdom, roughly 2686–2181 BC, is the pyramid age — Djoser, Sneferu, Khufu, Giza and Saqqara. The Middle Kingdom follows a collapse. The New Kingdom, 1550–1069 BC, is the age of empire and of everything at Luxor: Hatshepsut, Thutmose III, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun, Ramesses II, the Valley of the Kings.
Then decline and foreign rule: Nubians, Assyrians, Persians. Alexander arrives in 332 BC and his general founds the Ptolemaic dynasty, Greek-speaking pharaohs who build Edfu, Philae and Dendera — which is why those temples look different. Cleopatra is the last of them, and Rome takes over in 30 BC.
Alexander arrives in 332 BC and his general founds the Ptolemaic dynasty, Greek-speaking pharaohs who build Edfu, Philae and Dendera — which is why those temples look different.
Christianity arrives in the first century and Egypt becomes largely Coptic; Islam arrives in 641. Then Fatimids, Ayyubids, Mamluks, Ottomans, a French interlude, British occupation, independence in 1922, the republic in 1953. Almost every site you visit sits on several of these layers at once.
