Taking the long view is what a trip to Egypt is all about. Looking at the abodes of the mighty who ruled all they surveyed from as early as 3,500BC, it is hard not ponder the deep questions: where we all came from and where we're all going.

Such fundamentalism does no harm to your thinking process when you return and begin to apply it to business matters either, working out where your company, or even your entire sector, is heading in the long run and where it fits in with the changing world: it gets you out of the day-to-day rut.

Nor is it just the extraordinary things you see, the gold, the temples, the pyramids, that set you thinking. The constant barrage of people asking impossible prices for tourist trinkets that to my certain knowledge have not changed since 40 years ago (when I was last in Egypt) seem to me to excercise the mind on how not to proceed when mounting a sales pitch.

So insistent are they in waving, say, their models of cats (creatures sacred to the God Basted in ancient Egypt) that after a while you dare not even glance at their stalls, or show even the slightest interest in their wares.

They all seem to be operating on a principle of unenlightened self-interest (to paraphrase Adam Smith). Were they enlightened , it seemed to me, they would compete less frantically with each other with the result that tourists, their potential customers, would not be frightened off altogether. All would therefore benefit.

One new cry I noted on this visit to Egypt, as I was hassled around the pyramids at Giza by someone with the persistence of a leach with lucky scarabs for sale, was "No hassle. No hassle."

What is lacking in their sales methods is an acceptance of the principle that business breeds business. The fact that there are lots of stalls outside every monument need not necessarily be a turn-off for customers but, quite the reverse, a come-on.

After all, the tradesmen of Saville Row have long prospered because men wanting good suits know that lots of top tailors are to be found in that one place. Likewise, people wanting fine food in Oxford often go to the Covered Market because they are attracted by the sheer quantity of shops there.

But enough of that. Egypt, indeed the entire Middle East, would hardly have the charm it has were tourists not constantly subjected to persistent sales patter, conducted as far as I could see in a dozen languages, including Korean and Russian.

English, since the Iraq war and terrorist attacks at an ancient Egyptian temple, seems all but absent (I saw only one English and one American group on a four day trip).

But for anyone happy to discount such risks - either on the grounds that these days there is always risk everywhere, even in London, or that not visiting Egypt is tantamount to giving in to the terrorists - a cruise down the Nile from Aswan to Luxor provides another glimpse of the state of the world now and, of course, how we got here from earliest times.

As a person from Oxford, a familiar name greeted me immediately in Aswan: Isis. Apart from being an alternative name for the river Thames in Oxford - though the name here seems to date from no earlier than the 17th Century - Isis is also the great femimine deity of ancient Egypt, mother of the sun god Horus and venerated for occupying the seat of power.

Significantly, her influence increased right into the Greek and Roman periods and her temple at Philae was ony finally suppressed in the sixth century AD (a mere yesterday in Egypt where you quickly develop a habit of discounting even standing Roman ruins as "almost modern".) Her temple was half submerged after the first Aswan Dam was built by the British at the turn of the 20th century and would have been fully flooded when the new High Dam was built in the 1960s had it not been moved stone by stone to the nearby island of Agilika.

How far back do the roots of our architecture, such as that displayed in the Tower of the Five Orders at the Bodleian, really stretch?

That tower displays the five different classical capitals to be found on Greco-Roman columns, but a visit to Philae immediately makes it clear that the Greeks and Romans themselves based their designs on those of the Egyptians.

The Aswan Dam, built to regulate the annual flood of the Nile - which of course the ancients recognised as the lifeblood of Egypt - took about 19 times the volume of material to build as did the Great Pyramid of Ghiza.

Such facts constantly remind us Egypt is a fascinating country that teaches us much about how we live our lives today.

Chris Koenig travelled with Audley Travel, New Mill, Lane, Witney. Contact: www.audleytravel.com