Story of Cairo

Cairo was not built by pharaohs. It rose from desert sand in 969 CE, a new capital for a new empire, and in the centuries that followed, conquerors and caliphs, sultans and traders raised a city of staggering ambition. Story of Cairo traces this Islamic metropolis from its fiery birth through the glittering age of the Mamluks, when a thousand minarets pierced the sky and the city's madrasas and bazaars held the wisdom of the world, to its slow twilight under Ottoman rule and finally its humiliation at the hands of the British in 1882. Stanley Lane-Poole, the British Museum archaeologist who excavated at Cairo's gates, knew these streets and stones intimately. His descriptions of the city's medieval architecture are not dry catalogue but vivid portraiture: the massive gates that kept out enemies, the serene domes that held the dead, the noisy souks where spices from the Indies were weighed against gold from Sudan. This is a city captured in motion, built and burned and built again, its present always built upon the bones of the past. For anyone who has walked through Islamic Cairo's narrow lanes, or dreamed of doing so, Lane-Poole offers not a guidebook but a time machine.