Cairo & Giza

Cairo is where Egypt's later histories stand side by side: a Roman fortress, the church built on top of it, a medieval synagogue, a sultan's citadel and a nineteenth-century mosque. In our judgement it is also the best place to see what later Egypt made of the pyramids on its horizon.

Start in Old Cairo. Under Roman rule one of the legions that held Egypt was stationed at the fortress of Babylon, and fragments of it can still be seen in the grounds of the Coptic Museum. The Hanging Church takes its name from being raised over those ruins. A short walk away, the Ben Ezra Synagogue kept a storeroom of worn-out writings that went on filling for centuries, a whole community's paperwork that nobody threw away.

Then climb to the Cairo Citadel, begun for Salah al-Din in 1176 and the seat of Egypt's rulers until the mid-nineteenth century, crowned by the Muhammad Ali Mosque. The same reign reached out to Giza: Mark Lehner cites the medieval scholar Abd al-Latif's report that the emir Karakoush destroyed a number of small pyramids there, and blocks from Giza went into arches built across the floodplain.

The Egyptian Museum on Tahrir Square, opened in 1902, holds the long view from the Predynastic Period to the Graeco-Roman era. Khan el-Khalili is the part of the city that still trades. Our suggestion is to begin with the museum and end in the bazaar.

Giza is a plateau and a museum, and in our judgement the story that joins them is about people rather than kings. Three kings of the Fourth Dynasty, Khufu, his son Khafre and Menkaure, built their pyramids here over three generations, on a plate of limestone whose regular layers made the building possible.

The Giza Plateau page follows the workforce. Mark Lehner gives 20,000 to 30,000 as the generally accepted figure for the workers at any one time, organised in gangs with names such as "Friends of Khufu" and "Drunkards of Menkaure". In 1991 a digger at the edge of the plateau broke into two of their bakeries.

Each monument has its own page: The Great Pyramid of Khufu, the Pyramid Complex of Khafre, the Pyramid Complex of Menkaure and The Great Sphinx. At the edge of the plateau stands the Grand Egyptian Museum, whose galleries include Tutankhamun's burial goods and a museum for Khufu's boats. Our suggestion is to walk the plateau first, so that the objects in the museum return to a landscape you have already seen.

Saqqara is the cemetery of Memphis, and it was in use for almost the whole of ancient Egyptian history, from the officials of the First Dynasty to a Coptic monastery used until the eighth century AD. If Giza is a single statement, in our judgement Saqqara is a conversation that lasts nearly four thousand years.

It began with officials. Their huge mudbrick tombs stood along the edge of the escarpment, facing the sunrise and overlooking the capital below; one of them held the earliest rolls of papyrus yet discovered. Then came the kings: the Step Pyramid Complex of Djoser, the first building of monumental scale in Egypt built throughout of stone, and later the Pyramid Complex of Teti. By the Late Period Saqqara had become a city of sacred animals, with The Serapeum of the Apis bulls at its heart. The Imhotep Museum stands at the entrance, and the whole necropolis has its own page: Saqqara.

Saqqara is also where you can watch Egyptians studying their own past. More than a thousand years after the pyramid of Unas was built, Khaemwaset, son of Ramesses II and high priest at Memphis, restored it and carved an inscription to say so. Jan Assmann calls him the first known antiquarian and conservationist in human history.

Below the plateau lie the remains of the city the cemetery served, Memphis (Mit Rahina). To the south is Dahshur, where Sneferu learned to build a true pyramid.