History of the Republic of Egypt
On 22–26 July 1952, the Free Officers, a group of disaffected officers in the Egyptian army founded by Gamal Abdel Nasser, and headed by General Muhammad Naguib, initiated the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 with the overthrowing King Farouk, whom the military blamed for Egypt's poor performance in the 1948 war with Israel and lack of progress in fighting poverty, disease, and illiteracy in Egypt. In the following two years, the Free Officers consolidated power, and, following a brief experiment with civilian rule, abrogated the 1953 constitution, and declared Egypt a republic on 18 June 1953, Muhammad Naguib as Egypt's first President.
Pharaonism
Pharaonism celebrated Egypt as a distinct geographic and political unit whose origins went back to the unification of Upper and Lower Egypt in about 3100 BC, and which presented Egypt as more closely linked to Europe rather than to the Middle East. The focus on the ancient Egyptian past was used as a symbol of Egyptian distinctiveness, which was used to down-play Arab and Islamic identities, and was intended to brand Egypt as a European rather than a Near Eastern nation. Pharaonism first appeared in the early 20th century in the writings of Mustafa Kamil Pasha who called Egypt the world's first state and Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed who wrote about a "pharaonic core" surviving in modern Egypt.