On first impression, there is hardly a superlative too vast to capture the epic scale of this city of 12 million-or 14, or 16; no one really knows for sure-that sprawls in all directions. The traffic, the people, the chaotic rhythm of Cairo will all reinforce this impression, threatening to overwhelm you. In many ways Cairo is the proverbial overgrown village, full of little districts and communities that feel much smaller and more intimate than the city of which they're part.
Like so much else in Egypt, Cairo's charm is a product of its history, its network of districts and communities the physical remains of a thousand years of being conquered and reconquered by different groups. The city didn't really begin, as you might expect, with the pharaohs; they quartered themselves in nearby Memphis and Heliopolis, areas only recently overtaken by Cairo's outward urban spread. The Pyramids at Giza, on the west bank of the Nile, mislead the eye in search of Cairo's origins because this has always been an east-bank city, albeit one that moved west as siltation caused the Nile itself to move west. It's only in the past 40 years that the city has moved faster than the river, leaping the banks and drawing in the endless new suburbs on the west bank.
No, Cairo's history begins with a Roman trading outpost called Babylon-now referred to as Old or Coptic Cairo-at the mouth of an ancient canal that once connected the Nile to the Red Sea. But it was the 7th-century AD Arab invaders who can be said to have founded the city we know today with their encampment at Fustat, just north of Old Cairo. Under their great leader Amr Ibn al-As, the Arabs took over a land that had already been occupied by the Greeks,...
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