Egypt’s gold, as a single cube

The holding

Egypt’s gold reserve, in proportion

Egypt's central bank holds about 130 tonnes of gold — a mid-tier holder, 30th of the 38 nations the World Gold Council tracks. That is a number most people cannot picture, so picture this instead: gathered into one solid block, every bar of it would form a cube roughly 1.9 m on each side — about the height of a person. Gold is so dense (19.32 grams per cubic centimetre, about two and a half times the density of iron) that Egypt's entire reserve, worth approximately $17 billion, would occupy only about 7 cubic meters.

Gold makes up 38.2% of Egypt's official reserves — a moderate allocation, broadly in line with the world average of about 29%. Measured against the world's monetary gold, that block is about 0.4% of all the bullion held by every central bank and treasury on the planet. Egypt sits in Africa, much of it gold-producing.

The metal is held at Central Bank of Egypt, Cairo. In recent years Egypt has been a net buyer, steadily adding to the pile — part of the broad return to gold among emerging-market and reserve-diversifying central banks. Whether a reserve is growing or steady, its physical footprint barely changes: even doubling Egypt's gold would only widen the cube by about a quarter — the defining paradox of the metal is that staggering value keeps collapsing into a remarkably small space.

It is worth holding the comparison in mind. The largest reserve on Earth, the United States', is a cube only 7.5 m per side; all the gold ever mined in human history fits inside a cube about 22 m per side — the size of a seven-story building. Egypt's share of that 6,000-year inheritance is the block you see above.