TRAVEL   EGYPT   TOURS 

Brief history

 

The early period

 

Some 5,000 years ago Memphis—today lying mainly in ruins approximately 15 miles (24 km) southwest of Cairo—was a thriving metropolis; about 2,000 years ago the Romans occupied a town on the site of present-day Cairo called Babylon (later the Misr al-Qadīmah quarter). The seed from which contemporary Cairo later sprang was the town of Al-Fusṭāṭ, founded as a military encampment in 641 ceby ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs, an Arab general and administrator who brought Islam to Egypt.

 

Successive dynasties added royal suburbs to the increasingly prosperous commercial and industrial port city of Al-Fustat. Little remains of these early developments in the southern part of the city, except the tower of Trajan (dating to 130 ce), the mosques of ʿAmr ibn al-ʿAs (founded in 641–642) and Ahmad ibn Tulun (completed in 878), and the partially excavated mounds covering the site of Al-Fustat.

The conquering general, Jawhar, established a new, rectangular, walled city to the northeast of the existing settlements.

Al-Qāhirah and Al-Fustat coexisted until 1168, when the unfortified city of Al-Fustat was set on fire to protect Cairo from the Crusaders.

After Baybars I became the first Mamlūk sultan of undisputed legitimacy in 1260, Cairo served as the capital of the Mamlūk empire, which governed Egypt, much of the Levant, and parts of the Fertile Crescent until 1517.

Medieval Cairo reached its apogee during the Mamlūk era. By about 1340 Cairo had become the largest city in Africa, Europe, and Asia Minor, with almost half a million people living in an area five times greater than the original Fatimid walled city.

As a key link in the profitable east-west spice trade and the recipient of tribute from a wealthy empire, the city thrived both intellectually and culturally:.

The city’s population was decimated by plagues, including the outbreak of the Black Death in 1348. In addition, the spice trade monopoly was broken following Vasco da Gama’s voyage from Portugal to India (1497–99), undermining Cairo’s economic preeminence.

Finally, political autonomy was lost to the Turks, who after 1517 reduced Cairo to a provincial capital in the Ottoman Empire. In 1798, when Napoleon and his troops arrived in Cairo, fewer than 300,000 people were living in the city and its two port suburbs, Misr al-Qadīmah and Būlāq.

 

Development of the city

 

Muḥammad ʿAlī, sent to Egypt in command of an Ottoman expeditionary contingent to oppose the French, had by 1805 succeeded in receiving the appointments of viceroy and pasha of Egypt from the Ottoman government.

During a rule of more than 40 years, Muḥammad ʿAlī executed a series of sweeping programs, including the reorganization of the administrative structure, the improvement of irrigation systems, and the introduction of cotton, a commodity which Egypt would soon produce and trade on a large scale.

After the 1950s, Cairo and its metropolitan area witnessed a significant period of growth. 

By 1970, however, the city was suffering from overcrowding, severe traffic congestion, and acute pollution. Further, fueled by industrialization, the city had been growing northward since the 1950s into the fertile delta, resulting in the consumption of valuable farmland. To combat this uneven sprawl, in the 1970s the government began developing new towns and planned suburbs in the desert.

By the beginning of the 21st century, Cairo had become an increasingly stratified city, with large areas of informal housing occupied by the lower and middle classes and gated communities serving the upper classes. Although Cairo continues to be faced with many of the same problems afflicting other large metropolises in the developing world—particularly the problem of providing transportation and other infrastructural services to its greatly expanded population—it nevertheless remains among the world’s most vibrant cities.