The history of Cairo begins in the Roman period of Egyptian history (30 BC to 642 AD). At that time there was only one island at the heart of what is now the center of Cairo Roda Island and the main channel of the river lay to the east of its current banks, while farther south the channel lay farther to the west. Thirty kilometers to the southwest was ancient Memphis and its temples to the creator-god Ptah, while to the northeast (within the cultivated part of the Nile Valley) stood ancient Heliopolis, the great cult center to the sun-god Ra. But at the heart of what is today Cairo there was only a small but powerful fortified town, "Babylon," which was located on the east bank of the Nile River opposite the southern tip of Roda Island. This fortress was of great strategic significance, for most caravans and armies moving east-to-west or west-to-east across Egypt skirted the edges of the Delta and made use of Roda Island as a crossing-point.

The remains of the fortress of Babylon are situated in the modern Cairo region known as "Old Cairo," and within these remains are several medieval Coptic Churches (including one the Church of Saint Sergius that stands above a crypt which tradition says provided shelter to the Holy Family during the &Flight into Egypt); the medieval synagogue of Ben Ezra; and the Coptic Museum, which holds the world 's greatest collection of Christian Egyptian antiquities of the period 300 AD to 900 AD.

It was to the Fortress of Babylon that the Arab invaders of Egypt first came when they entered the country in 640 AD. After the fall of the fortress, the Arab commander, Amr b. al-'As, chose to make the camp-city which his army had established just north of Babylon his capital. This camp-city, "al-Fustat," soon supplanted Alexandria as the greatest city of Egypt, and at its heart lay the mosque that "Amr had founded the site of which is today occupied by a modern "Mosque of 'Amr b. al-'As" located just north of the Old Cairo area. From 700 to 1100 AD al-Fustat flourished and became one of the great cities of the Mediterranean world. The site of Fustat lay pressed into the narrow zone between the Nile River opposite the southern end of Roda Island and a low ridge giving access to the desert to the east. The city's growth eventually carried it up onto the ridge, but the desert area beyond was reserved for use as a cemetery. The cemetery of Fustat survives today as the core area of Cairo's largest and most important cemetery, the "Southern Cemetery," at the heart of which stands the great domed tomb of the Imam ash-Shafi'i, one of the dominant figures in the history of Islamic law. The Imam ash-Shafi'i lived in Fustat about 800 AD, but the domed tomb that covers his burial-place was constructed 400 years during the era of the Ayyubid Dynasty. Today, the site of Fustat is a vast area of urban ruins, for with the rise of "Cairo" proper after 1069 AD, Fustat began a long, slow, and ultimately terminal decline.

In 868 AD a general named Ibn Tulun was sent to Egypt by the Abbasid caliph of the day the ruler of the vast Arab-Islamic empire ruled from Baghdad in Iraq and of which Egypt was a part to suppress a local revolt. Ibn Tulun swiftly did so, but then established himself as the paramount ruler of an effectively independent Egypt. As a sign of his independence and authority, Ibn Tulun built a new "royal city" "al-Qataa'i" northeast of Fustat on a desert hill called Jabal Yashkur. Nevertheless, throughout the short era of the "Tulunid" Dynasty (868-902 AD) Fustat remained the main demographic and economic center of Egypt, while al-Qataa'i flourished as an administrative center oriented around the royal city's great mosque the "Mosque of Ibn Tulun" (built 876-879 AD). Later, in 969 AD, a Shi'ite dynasty based in Tunisia, the Fatimids, conquered Egypt and established a new palace city along the edge of the desert five kilometers northeast of Fustat. The site stood about three kilometers due east of the Nile and was separated from the river by a band of swamps and lakes that were not suitable for urban development. The new city was "al-Qaahira" Cairo: the "Victorious City" and at its heart another great mosque was constructed, the "Mosque of al-Azhar." It did not take long before the population of Fustat, attracted by the patronage available in the new royal residence, abandoned the older city and settled in the new one. By 1100 Cairo had supplanted Fustat as Egypt's most important city, and Ibn Tulun's city, al-Qataa'i, had been reduced to the rank of Cairo's southern suburb.

From 1100 to 1500 AD, Cairo was the grandest, largest, and most splendid city in the Western world, with a physical area of about five square kilometers and a population of about 750,000 souls. At the heart of the walled city of Cairo was a great square ("midaan") bordered by two important mosques: the Mosque of al-Azhar (founded about 971 AD) and the Mosque of al-Husayn (much rebuilt over the centuries; the current mosque was built in the nineteenth century). When the Fatimid Dynasty (969-1172 AD) was overthrown by Saladin's Ayyubid Dynasty (1172-1250 AD), the area west of the great central square became the city's principal market the forerunner of the modem "Khan ilKhaliili." The Ayyubid rulers built their palace on a spur of desert rock jutting out from the Muqattam Hills southeast of Cairo and overlooking the Ibn Tulun Mosque "al- 'Qal'a," the "Citadel," from which all of Egypt's subsequent rulers governed the country, including the Mamluks (1250-1517 AD) and the Ottoman Turks, who conquered Egypt in 1517.

After the Ottoman conquest, Cairo entered a long period of relative stagnation. It was now a provincial capital rather than the center of a major state, and it no longer received the royal patronage that it had enjoyed earlier. Then, in 1798, a French military expedition led by Napoleon briefly occupied Cairo. At that time the city was still surrounded by its medieval walls, and about half of its population of nearly 500,000 people lived within them. Most of the remainder lived in a large suburb that extended beyond the southern gate of the City to the Citadel. A smaller suburb extended beyond the northern gates of the city towards the Mosque of Baybars. The city's principal "sewer" was a canal that ran along its western walls the Khaliij al-Misri and emptied in the Nile to the south.

By 1800 AD, the long, steady shift westward of the Nile's channel a process that had been underway since the days of the Romans had fixed the River's banks in very much their present locations. One result of this process was the slow emergence of a second island in the Nile "Gazira & after about 1000 AD, although Gezira remained a low- lying marshland for many years. Another result was the appearance of patches of dry, solid land along the eastern bank of the Nile. One of these areas, Bulaq, had emerged as early as 1000 AD and became the site of a village that served as Cairo's "port" for the next eight hundred years, since the Nile and Cairo proper were still separated by two- to-three kilometers of marshland and lake. This marshland was unsuitable for urban development, but its lakes became an attractive location for Cairo's political elite, who built villas and hunting lodges. The marshland Iying between the River and the City was crossed by a series of causeways that carried roads from the "port" areas along the Nile to Cairo proper. North and south of the marshland were agricultural zones dotted with small villages (such as Shubra and Matarlya in the north and "Old Cairo" the sad remnant of old Fustat in the south), while the entire area Iying between the western banks of the Nile and the western edge of the Desert was similarly given over to agriculture and numerous small villages (such as "Giza," "Dokki," and "Agouza").

The French departed Cairo in 1801, and in 1805, Muhammad _Ali (reigned 1805-1848) became the Ottoman governor of Egypt. He founded a dynasty that, in one way or another, ruled Egypt until its last representative, King Farouk, abdicated in 1952. With Muhammad 'All's assumption of power the modem history of Cairo began. The city's population started to grow and the medieval "core" of the city became intensely crowded a characteristic that it retains to the present. But between 1800 and 1860, the city's physical expansion remained relatively limited in scope and tended to follow the activities of Cairo's rulers. For example, during this period, Bulaq became the center of Muhammad 'All's effort to develop a "modem" (that is, early nineteenth-century European-style) industrial infrastructure. Factories, warehouses, and Egypt's first printing press were established there, and by 1850 Bulaq had become an over-crowded, working-class zone a fact that accounts for the character of this quarter, which is located just north of the modern city center, today: intensely crowded, filled with the remnants of (dilapidated) early nineteenth century structures, and occupied by a large, Lower Middle Class population.

Muhammad 'Ali also built a substantial palace for himself north of Bulaq near the village of Shubra. Its presence there via the boulevard (modern Sharia Shubra) that Muhammad 'All built across the agricultural land began the process that would eventually link Shubra with Cairo, transforming Shubra from a rural village into, first, a well- to-do residential quarter at the end of the nineteenth century, and then, over the course of the twentieth century, into a broad, crowded, Lower Middle Class area. At the same time, the villages surrounding Shubra underwent a rapid population growth.

Muhammad 'Ali's successor, Abbas (1848-1854), made few contributions to Egyptian history of any real substance. But he did establish a military barracks north of the Mosque of Baybars (and thus just beyond the northern limits of Cairo) that came to bear his name. "Abbasiya" and that would become one of several foci for a rapid physical expansion out of Cairo's medieval core that began after 1860. Abbas also authorized an English entrepreneur named Shepheard to build a hotel in the Azbakiya area a hotel that would bear Shepheard's name and that would become one of the most famous in the world in the decades to come. By this time, drainage projects had caused Lake Azbakiya and much of the marshland Iying between Bulaq and Cairo to dry up, opening up a rich new territory for urban expansion. Indeed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, it would be this area the site of the old Lake Azbakiyya that would emerge as the new, dynamic center of "modern" Cairo.

Abbas was succeeded first by Said (reigned 1854-1863) and then by Ismail (reigned 1863-1879), and it was during Ismail reign that one of the most important eras in Cairo's history began. Ismail was an ardent Francophile and admirer of the physical changes that Baron Hausmann was bringing about in Paris in the 1860's tearing out whole sections of Paris' medieval core and "modernizing" the city by laying out broad new boulevards (such as the Champs d'Elysee). Ismail was determined to "modernize" Cairo in a similar fashion, and he ordered his architects to prepare plans to completely renovate Cairo's medieval core.

Few of these plans were implemented, but one result was the construction of two "boulevards" that cut east-to-west through the medieval city. One of these streets is the present "Shari'a Azhar," which passes through the main square of the medieval core by the Mosque of al-Azhar, and the other is " Sharia Muhammad 'Ali," which links modem Ataba Square just west of the medieval core with the Citadel. The former required that a street be created where none had existed before, while the later involved widening and developing an old artery that had once joined Bulaq with the Citadel. It was also during this period that most of Cairo's medieval walls were dismantled (leaving intact only the city's northern and southern gates Bab il-Futuuh, Bab in-Nay, and Bab Zuwayla northern wall) and that the khaliij al-Misri canal was filled in.

But if Ismail's impact on the physical character of the medieval core of the city was relatively limited, his other projects had a much more dramatic effect. His architects designed and laid out a new "modem" Cairo immediately adjacent to and west of the medieval core. This "new" Cairo was built around a series of open squares and broad thoroughfares. Azbakiya became a beautiful, planned garden, and together with the new Ataba and Opera Squares - with Shepheard's Hotel at their northern edge and the Opera House built by Ismail in 1869 between them - it formed the new heart of the city.

Modern Cairo's development continued in the decades following Ismail's abdication in 1879. By 1900, the area along the banks of the Nile south of Bulaq was being developed the modem "Center City," with a northern commercial zone centered about Midaan ("Plaza") Soliman Pasha and a southern residential zone (modem "Garden City") separated by a great central plaza: Midaan Ismailia (modern "Midaan at-Tahriir"). Midaan Ismailia had been laid out in the 1860's at the direction of Ismail and was located near a large military barracks (the "Qasr an-Nil!" barracks) built after 1850 along the banks of the river. It received its first major buildings in the 1860's and 1870's, including a palace built by Khairy Pasha University in Cairo.

In 1900 AD, the expansion of Cairo out of its medieval core westward to the banks of the Nile was nearing completion. There were now six squares that marked the dimensions of the new, "modern" part of the city: (1 ) Midaan Ismailia (modem Midaan at-Tahriir), with a royal palace occupying the site of the present Mugam'a; (2) Midaan Ataba, which marked the eastern end of a downtown "shopping" district; (3) Midaan 'Abdiin, south of Midaan Ataba and the site of a new, large royal palace; (4) Midaan Sayyida Zaynab, a southern square located near a famous mosque marking the burial-place of a grand-daughter of the Prophet Muhammad; (5) Bab al-Hadiid (modem "Midaan Ramsees"), a northern square giving access to Cairo's turn-of-the-century train station; and (6) Midaan Abbasiya, which marked the northernmost expansion of the "New City." All of the area within these squares was filled with buildings of a typically European style of architecture and decoration.

But to the north of the "New City," Bulaq had become an intensely crowded, working-class quarter, and the dividing line between the "New City" end Bulaq marked by modem Sharia Ramses remains a stark division between two very different socioeconomic universes. North of Bulaq, Shubra was beginning to merge with a vast, poor, semirural conglomeration that was the product of the expansion of traditional villages. To the south, the "Old Cairo" quarter was becoming the nucleus of another large, semi-rural zone that blocked a southward expansion of the modern city. Finally, to the east lay the medieval core, which had been impoverished by the flight of the well-to- do to the "New City."

As population growth continued in the early twentieth century, the expansion of the "New City" could only continue by a physical "leap" across the Nile. By 1940, modem residential zones were developing on both Roda and Gezira Islands "Manial" on Roda and "Zamalek" on Gezira but the western bank was still primarily agricultural, although the urban development of this area accelerated with establishment of a campus for Cairo University near the village of Giza in the 1920's.

In addition, in 1902, European financiers began the development of an elite residential oasis called Heliopolis in the desert northeast of Cairo the first attempt to direct Cairo's expansion into the desert. By 1920, Heliopolis had become the most exclusive address in Egypt, but by 1950 it elite character was beginning to change, and it was slowing being transformed into the broad, Upper Middle Class residential zone that it is today still an area that is one of Cairo's "more well-to-do" residential zones, but no longer as exclusive as it was in the early Twentieth Century.

Five main themes dominate the history of Cairo over the past four decades. One theme is the expansion of the city's population from a base of about two million people in 1950 to more than fourteen million in 1990. A second theme is the government's promotion of heavy industrial development in the southern suburb of Helwan, which today is the center of Egypt's iron-and-steel and automobile-assembly industries. A third theme is the expansion of modem Cairo to the west bank of the Nile, where the well-to-do residential zones such as "Giza," "Dokki," "Agouza," and "Muhandiseen" swallowed whole the agricultural villages that were located there, often taking their names in the process. A fourth theme is the massive in-migration of rural Egyptians over the past forty years, which has led to the emergence of an enormous "ring of poverty" completely surrounding all of the earlier zones of the Cairo's development, including the Medieval Core, the nineteenth century "New City," Old Cairo, and the islands and the west bank. This ring is characterized by residential zones "Dar as-Salaam" in the south, "Bulaq at-Takruur" and "Imbaaba" to the west, "Shubra al-Khayma" to the north, and the "Cemetery" areas to the east where poverty is extreme, unemployment is common, and access to public services is limited. The fifth theme is the manner in which, since about 1955, the city has expanded into the deserts beyond the "ring of poverty".

Today more than 40% of the Greater Cairo Area is located in what was, only a century ago, utter desert. But only about 15% (two million people) of Cairo's present population lives in such well-to-do desert suburbs as "Heliopolis," "Nasr City," "Muqattam City," "New Ma'adi," and "il-Haram," because the expense of developing and maintaining residential communities in an essentially desert environment inevitably sets the cost of living in these areas far beyond the incomes of most Cairenes.

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