Cairo Battleground Of Empires

The city of Cairo is an architectural masterpiece 5,000 years in the making, created by some of humanity’s greatest empire-builders. From the pharaohs to Napoleon, Michael Scott reveals how five civilisations left their mark on Egypt’s teeming capital.

1 Playground of the pharaohs

Long before Cairo appeared, the Nile delta was a pivot of one of the ancient world’s great civilisations

You can’t tell a history in Egypt without the ancient Egyptians. Cairo didn’t appear for more than three millennia after Pharaoh Khufu commissioned the Great Pyramid at Giza, but that doesn’t mean the ancient Egyptians weren’t active in the region the city now occupies. The reason for the site’s importance is a simple geographical one. Cairo sits at the base of the Nile delta, the point where the mighty river starts to split into many tributaries heading towards the Mediterranean. From the earliest civilisations, this was one of the most strategically desirable pieces of real estate in all of Egypt.

From c3100 BC, when Egypt was united under one ruler, to the end of the so-called Old Kingdom a thousand years later, the ancient Egyptians had their political capital on the outskirts of modern Cairo. It wasn’t called Cairo, of course, but Memphis – and, sadly, very little survives from that once splendid city.

Pharaohs were laid to rest in the great burial grounds at Saqqara, also in the outskirts of modern Cairo, within sight of Memphis. The exception to that rule was the fourth dynasty (c2600–2490 BC), whose rulers had their pyramids constructed on the Giza plateau. The plateau (which, again, was situated on the site of modern Cairo) was a natural plate of limestone, high above sea level. At the time of the fourth dynasty, it actually sat next to the river Nile (the Nile has shifted its course east and west continuously over the millennia).