Position 4 - Cairo, Looking Southwest Across The City To The Great Pyramids, That Furnished Stone For Many Of Its Buildings

The cemetery and the citadel are now out of range on our left; on our right is the northern quarter of the city, behind us is the eastern desert, while the prospect before us again is the southern part of the city, but we now look southwestward, not northwestward as when we stood on the bastion of the citadel (Position 2). But we have much the same prospect of domes and minarets rising on every hand from a confused expanse of houses showing no perceptible order or arrangement, because there is none, and they lie on innumerable little crooked lanes, narrow and tortuous, as if the houses were dice which had been shaken up in some colossal hat and thrown down as they happened to fall, only taking care that every spare inch of ground should be covered.

That high-walled building on the extreme left, of which we see only one corner, is the mosque of Rifaiyeh, which we saw by that of the Sultan Hasan from the citadel (Position 2). Immediately on its right over the dome with the peak awry, you see the sandhills and rubbish heaps on the south of the present city, where the old vanished city of Misr, 'Amr's “city of the tent” was located. Between the dome just referred to and the distant sandhills you notice a horizontal whitish streak, beginning just below the peak of the dome and extending toward the right. That is the court of the oldest mosque in Cairo.

It was built in 877-879 A. D. by Ibn Tulûn, the first independent Sultan of Egypt, who freed himself from the weak caliphs of Bagdad and made Egypt a great power, governing Syria and Mesopotamia also. In his day Cairo did not yet exist, but over where you see the sand-hills were the busy streets, teeming docks and swarming markets of old Misr. Outside Misr, on its northern and western outskirts, Ibn Tulûn built yonder ancient mosque, which has now been standing over a thousand years.

The only mosque in Egypt which is older, is the one built beside the fortress of Babylon, by its conqueror Amr ibn el-As, in 640 A. D.; but that is so much altered by restoration and addition that it is no longer the mosque which Amr built there. From here, then, we see how the mosque of Ibn Tulûn forms a link with the old Cairo on the south, which gradually moved northward until the present city was founded here at our feet by the Fatimids in 969 A. D.

Only a very little of the old Fatimid city still remains, but the city, which we have before us, is mainly a work of the 14th century and later, the city of the Arabian Nights. For it was here and in the city as you now see it from this point that the Arabian Nights, with their charming pictures of the life of the common people, the life of the shops, houses and bazaars, were put into their final form, though as every one knows, they contain tales of far earlier date, some of them even dating from an age as remote as the 12th Dynasty, of the old Pharaohs 4,000 years ago. Think of it! some of the tales which these Moslems of the Cairo bazaars love to listen to, are almost as old as those pyramids, of which we get here our first glimpse, dimly rising on that western horizon, where the faint line of the western cliffs mingles with the paler hue of the afternoon sky (Map 4).

And those pyramids, to which we shall yet pay a long visit, furnished much of the stone for this city. When Saladin built the citadel, and employed on the work the Europeans whom he had captured from the ranks of the Crusaders, the stone which the wretched captives wrought, was taken from the smaller pyramids of Gizeh . In mosque architecture, however, the use of stone did not become extensive until the 14th century; thus the old mosque of Ibn Tulûn is of brick plastered over, but the magnificent mosque of the Sultan Hasan, which we saw from the citadel, is of stone taken from the pyramids over yonder on the horizon.

It would take too much of our time to identify all these minarets before us, date them and connect them with the great events in the history of Moslem Egypt, with which many of them were identified in one way or another. But we must look at these two at our feet for a moment. Built in the days of the Circassian Mamlukes, within a generation or two of the Turkish conquest of Egypt, they are exquisite examples of the classic age of Saracen architecture. If you could have entered the mosque of Ibn Tulûn or any of the older mosques, as they were left by their builders, you would have found no dome, no minaret, and no ornate façade, but simply a court surrounded by a colonnaded portico, dispensing with the slightest trace of architectural decoration without and severely plain within.

It was the Mamlukes of the 13th century who gradually brought in these things, although the elements of a façade were introduced as early as the latest of the Fatimids, and the tower which preceded the minaret was already found on the mosque of Ibn Tulûn. Five times a day the Muezzins appear in the balcony of these minarets and summon the faithful to prayers. Of the real purpose of the dome we shall have more to say when we have visited the so-called tombs of the caliphs.

What a volume of history this old town is, if time and patience would but permit us to search for all the landmarks of great events and imperial epochs, which swarm around us on every side! From this point we see more effectively than we shall see again anywhere in this valley, the monuments which span the whole mighty sweep of oriental history—yes, even the whole history of mankind.

For out there on the horizon are the greatest remains of early man surviving anywhere in the world, and at our feet is the city of Egypt's latest masters, the home of the Moslem conquerors; while distributed along the river as we ascend, we shall find the monuments of all the ages which fill out the vast epoch lying between these two extremes. Nowhere else in the world can you overlook such a metropolis and at the same time see the greatest monuments of earliest human history, looking down upon the roofs of the modern city.

Let us now visit one of the best of the works of the Saracen architect, and when we have done so we shall descend into the streets of the old city. We will leave this city of the living and go out into the desert east of the town, nearly a mile behind us to a city of the dead. This next position is shown on Map 4 by the red lines numbered 5 on the east of the city. Evidently we shall be looking a little west of north.