Upper Egyptian

Upper Egyptians, or Sa'idis, are the people of the narrow Nile valley south of the delta, the region called in Arabic Ṣaʿīd Miṣr and studded with old river towns such as Asyut and Qena. Under Islamic rule the valley formed a province separate from Lower Egypt, administered from Fustat through the governor's deputies.

Its speech is Sa'idi Arabic, a group of related Upper Egyptian varieties of Egyptian Arabic, and Arabicization proceeded more slowly here than in the delta: Coptic long remained a living language in the valley and was still spoken by peasant women in the seventeenth century. In the eleventh century Hilalian pastoralists drifted west from the Sa'id into Libya and as far as Tunis.

Under Mamluk and then Ottoman rule the remote valley served as a refuge and power base for rival Mamluk beys, as when Abu-l-Dhahab occupied Asyut in 1772 and Ibrahim and Murad Bey retreated there in 1786 ahead of an Ottoman army.