Cairo

Al-Qāhirah (Cairo) is the capital of Egypt and one of the largest urban clusters in Africa. The Greater Cairo metropolitan area has a population of 21.9 million, it is the 12th-largest in the world by population.

Heliopolis, another important city and major religious center, was located in what is now the North-Eastern suburbs of Cairo. It was largely destroyed by the Persian invasions in 525BC and 343BC and partly abandoned by the late first century BC.

Cairo is heavily associated with Ancient Egypt, thanks to the great Giza pyramid complex and the ancient cities of Memphis and Heliopolis. Cairo is located near the Nile Delta (about 20km North), the city first developed as Fustat, a settlement founded after the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 640AD. Under the Fatimid dynasty a new city, Cairo, was founded nearby in 969AD. It later superseded Fustat as the main urban centre during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods (12th–16th centuries). Cairo has long been a centre of the region’s political and cultural life, and is titled “the city of a thousand minarets” for its preponderance of Islamic architecture.

The fortress, Babylon, was built by the Roman Emperor Diocletian (r.285–305) at the entrance of a canal connecting the Nile to the Red Sea that was created earlier by Emperor Trajan (r.98–115). Further North of the fortress, near the present-day district of al-Azbakiya, was a port and fortified outpost known as Tendunyas.

While no structures older than the 7th century have been preserved in the area aside from the Roman fortifications, historical evidence suggests that a sizeable city did exist. This city was important enough that its bishop (Cyrus), participated in the Second Council of Ephesus in 449. However, the Byzantine-Sassanian War between 602 and 628 caused great hardship and likely caused much of the urban population to leave for the countryside, leaving the settlement partly deserted. Cairo’s oldest extant churches, such as the Church of Saint Barbara and the Church of Saints Sergius and Bacchus, are located inside the fortress walls in what is now known as Old Cairo or Coptic Cairo.

Today, Cairo has the oldest and largest cinema and music industry in the Arab World, as well as the world’s second-oldest institution of higher learning, Al-Azhar University.

With a population of over 10 million spread over 453Km², Cairo is by far the largest city in Egypt. An additional 9.5 million inhabitants live close to the city.