The Nile

by Toby Wilkinson

  Muslims and Christians, by hundreds of thousands, crowded the Nile on boats, or in kiosks overlooking the river, or on the banks, all eager for pleasure … The sound of music was heard all about, with singing and dancing. It was a splendid night, the best in all Egypt for beauty and gaiety; the doors of the separate (city) quarters were left open, and most people bathed in the Nile, knowing well that it is a sure preservative and cure for all disease.4

  But the Nile, as the Egyptians well knew, could bring curses as well as blessings. In 967, an exceptionally low inundation led to widespread famine, and the death of over six hundred thousand people in and around Fustat—a large proportion of the population. Those who did not die, fled. The stage was set for the next decisive moment in Cairo’s history.

  Sensing Egypt’s weakness, on 1 July 969 a North African army raised by the Shiite Fatimids entered the Nile Valley and swiftly took possession of the country. They established their headquarters to the north of Fustat—according to legend, on an auspicious date when the planet Mars (“al-Qahir” in Arabic) was in the ascendant. Hence they named their new city al-Qahira (Cairo). Not coincidentally, it also meant “the victorious.” Maintaining control through force of arms, the Fatimids turned Cairo into a great fortified city, the centre of an independent Shiite caliphate that rivalled the Sunni caliphate of the East and controlled a rival empire stretching from North Africa via Sicily and Egypt to Palestine and Yemen. Egyptian harbours were expanded to accommodate the Fatimid fleet, and arsenals, shipyards and customs houses were established on the banks of the Nile at Fustat, restoring its fortunes by transforming it into a commercial centre. As for the Fatimids’ new imperial capital of al-Qahira, it was dominated by a huge palace complex, the centre of their rule, which is said to have been so massive and looming that it looked from a distance like a mountain. Other palaces were built outside the city walls, especially by the sides of canals and the Nile—like all their forebears, the Fatimids drew refreshment and inspiration from Egypt’s great river. Within their walled city, the Fatimids’ most lasting foundation was the great congregational mosque of al-Azhar, constructed between 970 and 972. As well as being one of the Muslim world’s most impressive centres of worship, al-Azhar also developed a reputation for teaching and learning, and retains to this day the accolade of being the oldest surviving university in the world.

  From its headquarters in Cairo, Islamic scholarship led the world in the tenth and eleventh centuries AD. The West, by contrast, was still emerging from the Dark Ages. But what the West lacked in education, it more than made up for in military might. The launch of the Crusades in the early twelfth century—ostensibly to protect Constantinople from the Turks and secure the Holy Land for Christendom, but in reality to win empires for the European powers—brought death and destruction to Muslim lands across the Middle East. Egypt was invaded in 1117, and fifty years later another Crusader army burned and destroyed Fustat. Al-Qahira was next in the firing line, and the Fatimid rulers took the step of appointing the renowned leader of Syrian troops stationed in Egypt to defend the city against the Crusaders. It was a brilliant tactical decision, but a terrible strategic error. The troop-leader, by the name of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi, built a huge citadel on high ground to the east of al-Qahira, with impregnable walls and a commanding view over the city. It not only resisted Crusader attack, but also provided Salah al-Din (better known in the West as Saladin) with his own powerbase. He cast off Fatimid rule, recognised the Sunni caliph in Baghdad, but effectively ruled Egypt independently. A great victory against the forces of Christendom in 1179 cemented his reputation as a Muslim warrior-hero, and he set about restoring Egypt to its former glory. Once again, harnessing the bounty of the Nile was the key to renewed prosperity. The citadel itself was supplied with drinking water by an aqueduct that ran all the way from the river. Saladin ordered the Bahr Yusuf to be dredged, to improve crop yields in the Fayum; improved the irrigation system throughout the country; and beautified the mosque of the Nilometer on Roda Island, in honour of the inundation itself.

  Throughout the Middle Ages—under both Saladin’s Ayyubid dynasty and the Turkic-speaking slave dynasty of the Mamluks which followed—Cairo, like the rest of Egypt, drew its strength from the Nile, and the river’s annual regime dominated the city’s cultural and religious life. Cairo’s river-wharfs bustled with trade from all corners of the Mediterranean and Middle East, leading one Arab commentator to boast that the city was “the storehouse of the Occident, the entrepôt of the Orient.”5 Ibn Battuta wrote that on the Nile there were “thirty-six thousand vessels belonging to the Sultan and his subjects, which sail upstream to Upper Egypt and downstream to Alexandria and Damietta, laden with goods and commodities of all kinds.”6 Commerce created great wealth, and Egypt’s rulers displayed their power and prosperity by building lavish new mosques throughout the capital. From Ibn Tulun with its immense courtyard and Sultan Hassan with its soaring portal to al-Hakim with its pepper-pot minarets and al-Aqmar with masonry that shines in the moonlight, the medieval mosques of Islamic Cairo are one of Egypt’s cultural treasures—built, like the pyramids and temples of the pharaohs, on the Nile’s bounty.

  But with a burgeoning population, Cairo also suffered more than anywhere else in Egypt from the effects of low Niles. A seven-year famine of biblical proportions raged from 1066 to 1072, to be surpassed in misery only by the effects of a poor inundation in 1201–2. On the latter occasion, the ensuing starvation caused such a high mortality rate that “a single property was said to have passed through the hands of forty heirs within the space of a month.”7 According to one of the more colourful histories of medieval Egypt, “Men waylaid women in the streets to seize their infants, and baby fricassee and haggis of children’s heads were ordinary articles of diet.”8

  With life poised so precariously between agony and plenty, it is little wonder that the atmosphere in Cairo reached fever pitch each year in August when the annual inundation was due. In 1050 AD, the Persian traveller Naser-e Khosraw recorded that “From the day it begins its increase, criers are sent through the city to proclaim how many ‘fingers’ God has increased the Nile that day.”9 Nearly eight centuries later, the same custom was witnessed by the English visitor Edward Lane, who noted that “the rise of the Nile is proclaimed daily in the streets of Cairo by The Crier of the Nile.”10 When the river had risen between twenty and twenty-one feet, “the completion of the Nile” was proclaimed. The city’s grandees and much of its population would assemble on Roda Island ready for the “Day of the Breaking of the River” the following morning. Before dawn, workmen would start to dismantle the dam at Old Cairo, and when the Governor of Cairo arrived, the final cut would be made, allowing the floodwaters to pour through the dry ditch that bisected the city and into the dust-bowl of Ezbekiya, turning it into a muddy lake. This was an occasion for great rejoicing, as Lane recorded:

  the government supplies a great number of fireworks, chiefly rockets, to honour the festival, and to amuse the populace during the night preceding the day when the dam is cut, and during the operation itself, which is performed early in the morning. Many small tents for the sale of sweetmeats, fruits, and other eatables, and coffee, etc., are likewise pitched along the bank of the isle of Er-Rodah, opposite the entrance of the Canal …

  When the dam has been cut away … and all the great officers whose presence is required have arrived, the Governor of the metropolis throws a purse of small gold coins to the labourers. A boat, on board of which is an officer of the late Walee, is then propelled against the narrow ridge of earth, and breaking the slight barrier, passes through it, and descends with the cataract thus formed.11

  People would plunge into the canal as part of the festivities (in 1834 three people were drowned), so grateful were they that the spectre of famine had been banished for another year.

  By the time Edward Lane visited Cairo in 1834, Egypt under Muhammad Ali was on the brink of a modernisation programme that would change the country, and the char
acter of its capital, for ever. For some visitors, change could not come too soon. One nineteenth-century American tourist commented, “Cairo is a big place, and can stand a good deal of improving.”12 But for many Europeans, the allure of Egypt—of the Orient—needed no refining. An aristocratic British visitor to Cairo, in the same year as Lane, was entranced by the view from the Citadel, and moved to poetry by “the majestic river, as it winds its way down this beautiful valley, bearing verdure and fertility on its dimpled waters.”13 Cairo was, after Constantinople, the greatest political and economic centre in the Middle East; its bazaars were filled with wares from across North Africa and the Levant (including slaves); and the Islamic city, with its maze of narrow streets and decorated mosques, conjured up images of The Arabian Nights in the Western imagination. European residents were few, and lived in their own quarter, shut off from the rest of the city by great wooden doors which were closed at night, and at times of riot or plague (a great pestilence the year after Lane’s visit carried off a third of the population of Cairo). If there was no space in the European (or “Frank”) Quarter, travellers would stay in Bulaq, Cairo’s main port situated a mile to the north-west of the Islamic city. Here the viceroy and other wealthy Cairenes had their summer palaces on the banks of the Nile.

  AS THE NINETEENTH CENTURY PROGRESSED and the trickle of European visitors turned into a flood, the demand for lodgings in the city offered an opportunity for entrepreneurs, and Cairo’s first purpose-built hotels began to appear. At first, these were located in the Frank Quarter or Ezbekiya immediately to the west. Although it was dotted with rubbish dumps and with fetid marshes left over from the annual inundation, Ezbekiya was nonetheless an open space in an otherwise congested city, and its desirability in European eyes had been further enhanced by the fact that Napoleon had set up his headquarters here in 1798. In the 1820s, there were just four hotels in Cairo (two in the Frank Quarter—Hill’s and the Hotel du Nil—and two closer to Ezbekiya—Levick’s and the Orient). Twenty years later, they had been joined by a clutch of competitors, including the Hotel de l’Europe where Florence Nightingale stayed for three weeks in 1849—arriving just two days after Gustave Flaubert, who stayed a night at the Orient. The cutting of a canal around Ezbekiya meant that the area no longer flooded during the annual inundation. Secured by gates locked at night, it was transformed into an elegant tree-lined garden, with a fountain at the centre, making it even more attractive to Europeans. Cairo’s arrival on the international tourist scene was marked in 1850 when Hill’s, also known as the British Hotel, moved to new premises at the north-west corner of Ezbekiya and changed its name to Shepheard’s; over the succeeding century, it would become the most famous hotel in Egypt, if not the world.

  Where Muhammad Ali had encouraged European immigrants to bring Egypt into the modern world, his grandson Khedive Ismail went one stage further. In his youth, Ismail had studied in Paris, and a subsequent visit to the city for the Exposition Universale in 1867 awakened major ambitions for his own capital. Ismail had the fortune to be guided around Paris by none other than Baron Haussmann, the architect and town planner who had transformed the French capital in the mid nineteenth century with the laying-out of wide boulevards and squares. Ismail was so impressed that he decided Cairo needed the same treatment, but instead of rebuilding the Islamic city, he set about creating an entirely new district on low-lying marshy land to the west. To encourage the creation of fine buildings in the Parisian style, the Khedive offered free land to any developer who would build on it, within a year and a half, a property worth at least 3,000 francs. So the fine edifices of what is now downtown Cairo started to appear. Ezbekiya was no longer a park on the western extremity of the city but its central hub, graced with an opera house modelled on La Scala Milan, further enhancing its popularity with European expatriates and visitors; and to coincide with the official opening of the Suez Canal in 1869, another grand hotel was built next to Shepheard’s (known as the New Hotel, it would later change its name to the Grand Continental).

  An extract from an article in Belgravia magazine of 1873, entitled “Wintering in Egypt” (other articles in the same volume include “Boarding and Day Schools,” “College Scouts,” and “The Philosophy of Grand Hotels”), conjures up the attractions of the Egyptian capital for well-heeled British visitors in the late nineteenth century:

  Cairo is, par excellence, the most perfect Arab city of the present day, and one in which its inhabitants have, perhaps, attained a higher degree of civilisation than in any other city in the East … Cairo, from its clear dry atmosphere and equable temperature, is now admitted to be one of the most desirable winter resorts for invalids in the world … At Cairo, the invalid or tourist can be constantly in the open air, either on foot, donkey-back, horse-back, or in a carriage … The complete change, too, from the habits and customs of Western Europe … is, I am convinced, of immense importance … Who could think of dyspepsia or hypochondriasis while beholding the lovely sunrises and glorious sunsets …14

  Amelia Edwards, too, in her own inimitable style, had plenty to say about the delights of Cairo. When not describing the bazaars with their “manifold combinations of light and shade, colour, costume, and architectural detail,”15 she was passing comment on the motley crowd in the dining-room at Shepheard’s Hotel:

  Anglo-Indians homeward or outward bound, European residents, or visitors established in Cairo for the winter … invalids in search of health; artists in search of subjects; sportsmen keen upon crocodiles; statesmen out for a holiday; special correspondents alert for gossip; collectors on the scent of papyri and mummies; men of science with only scientific ends in view; and the usual surplus of idlers who travel for the mere love of travel.16

  Late nineteenth-century Cairo was not only the playground of Europe, but, with the construction of the Suez Canal by the French and the proclamation of a British Empire in India, a scene of intense rivalry between the great powers. Since Ezbekiya and downtown Cairo had been modelled in the French style, the British decided to lay out their own part of the capital, Garden City, in the English style—complete with winding roads to conjure up memories of Surrey lanes, and mansions with large gardens leading down to the Nile.

  Between the British and the French, not to mention Khedive Ismail, Cairo was transformed over the space of barely fifty years from an old Islamic city of narrow streets and mosques into a thoroughly modern, cosmopolitan capital of grand public buildings, majestic avenues and pleasure palaces. But this was not the first building boom in the city’s history, nor would it be its last.

  Despite the rash of modern excrescences that jostle with elegant minarets on the skyline of Cairo, the Pyramids at Giza are still visible across large parts of the city, standing proud and immoveable as they have for 4,500 years. They are the sole remaining Wonder of the Ancient World, and an ever-present reminder of Egypt’s past glories. They owe their location to the ancient capital of Memphis, whose vast royal necropolis spread out along the western escarpment of the desert for a distance of thirty or forty miles, from the northern edge of the Fayum in the south to Abu Rawash in the north. Earlier pyramids had been built at Dahshur and Saqqara, but it was the particular genius of the Fourth Dynasty king Khufu, followed by his son and grandson, to situate their monuments on the elevated Giza Plateau, so as to make them appear even larger and more impressive. The statistics associated with the Great Pyramid of Khufu are humbling: 2,300,000 blocks of stone, each weighing an average of two tons, set in place at a rate of one block every two minutes for ten hours a day over a period of at least twenty years; alignment to true north with an error of only one-twentieth of a degree; and a finished height of 481 feet, making it the tallest building in the world until the construction of the great European cathedrals.

  According to the Arab proverb, “Man fears Time, but Time fears the Pyramids”; and it is difficult to see, short of a nuclear Armageddon, how anything could obliterate the pyramids from the landscape; they are as close to eternal as an
y man-made construction can be. Yet, as the scars on the faces of the three Giza pyramids show, men have certainly tried to dent their majesty, if not dismantle them entirely. Perhaps the greatest outrage perpetrated on the pyramids, at least in modern times, was carried out in the name of science. The culprit was one Richard Vyse (1784–1853), a member of the English landed gentry who enjoyed a colourful and varied career as an army officer, member of parliament and latterly amateur archaeologist. Having voted against Catholic emancipation and parliamentary reform, Vyse was nothing if not sure of his own mind. A visit to Egypt in 1835—the year after Edward Lane—prompted an interest in the monuments of Giza, and Vyse returned a year later determined to open up their hidden secrets. His methods were brutally effective. First, he set up a drilling rig on the back of the Sphinx and bored into it to try to find hidden passages—without success. Worse still, he used gunpowder to blast out entrances to the three relieving chambers inside the Great Pyramid; the ink inscriptions that came to light proved beyond doubt that the monument had been built for Khufu. Vyse established the ownership of the third pyramid in the same manner, by blasting away some of the granite casing blocks and revealing the entrance. In the course of his “excavations” by dynamite, Vyse caused irreparable damage to nearly every pyramid at Giza. To add insult to injury, Vyse sent Menkaura’s sarcophagus back to England, but the ship carrying it sank and the precious artefact was lost.

  Vyse was not the first to attack the wonders of Giza. The Sphinx had been mutilated on the orders of a Muslim sheikh in AD 1300, and the Mamluk army had used it for target practice. The builders of Cairo’s Fatimid-era city walls could not resist a tempting source of ready-cut stone, and stripped away most of the pyramids’ casing blocks to supply their own construction project. (The blocks, of fine white limestone, had originally been brought to Giza by barge, during the inundation, from the quarries of Tura across the other side of the Nile. Those same quarries remain open today, producing cement for Cairo’s modern construction boom.) In the mid nineteenth century, Flinders Petrie reported seeing caravans of up to three hundred camels every day carrying stone away from the pyramids for the construction of Khedive Ismail’s new Cairo.