Born in Cairo in 1945, Mansour was the head of the Supreme Constitutional Court for just two days when the army named him as the leader of the Arab world's most populous state.

He took the helm of a nation deeply divided over the army's ouster of its first freely elected president Mohamed Morsi on July 4 following days of deadly clashes between his supporters and their increasingly numerous opponents.

He has been named by Morsi himself to Egypt's top judicial post, which, following the army's suspension of the constitution, catapulted him into political power.

The 67-year-old father of three, who won a scholarship to France's Ecole Nationale de l'Administration, was a long-serving judge under former dictator Hosni Mubarak.

But he served in the state-sponsored religious courts which deliver fatwas, or edicts, on observance, as well as in the civil and criminal courts.

Mansour helped draft the supervision law for the presidential elections that brought Morsi to power in 2012, which included setting a legal timeframe for electoral campaigning.

He was deputy head of the Supreme Constitutional Court from 1992.

The judge could probably have walked through one of the huge opposition protests that swept the country on Sunday prompting the military's dramatic intervention without being recognized.

His photograph was never among those brandished by the millions of demonstrators mobilized by the grassroots opposition to the Muslim Brotherhood's grip on power during Morsi's tumultuous 12 months in power.