Cairo (Chronicles Abroad)

San Francisco: Chronicle Books, 1994. First Printing [Stated]. Hardcover. as is/Very good. ix, [1], 175, [7] pages. This is one of the Publisher's Chronicles Abroad series. Contributions by Rudyard Kipling--Preface, Naguib Mahfouz--Blessed Night; Alexandre Kinglake--Cairo and the Plague, Alifa Rifaat--Mansoura, William Burroughs--The Western Lands; Beryl Markham--West with the Night; William Thackeray--To Cairo; Yehia Hakki--An Empty Bed; Michael Palin--Cairo; and Lawrence Of Arabia--Home Letters. A rare quality escape from this publisher. The pagination goes 1-6, 23-38, 23-175. Thus pages 7-22 appear to be missing and pages 23-38 appear twice. Cairo is the capital of Egypt and the city-state Cairo Governorate, and is the country's largest city, home to 10 million people. It is also part of the largest urban agglomeration in Africa, the Arab world and the Middle East: The Greater Cairo metropolitan area, with a population of 21.9 million, is the 12th-largest in the world by population. Cairo is associated with ancient Egypt, as the Giza pyramid complex and the ancient cities of Memphis and Heliopolis are located in its geographical area. Located near the Nile Delta, the city first developed as Fustat, a settlement founded after the Muslim conquest of Egypt in 640 next to an existing ancient Roman fortress, Babylon. Under the Fatimid dynasty a new city, al-Q hirah, was founded nearby in 969. It later superseded Fustat as the main urban centre during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods (12th-16th centuries). Cairo has long been a centre of the region's political and cultural life, and is titled "the city of a thousand minarets" for its preponderance of Islamic architecture. Cairo's historic center was awarded World Heritage Site status in 1979.