Nubia’s Relationship With Ancient Egypt

During the seventh century, the Christian Church in the Nubian countries (Nobatia, Makurra, and ‘Alwah) sided more with the Coptic Church. This made church ties with Egypt stronger. Following the Arab conquest of Egypt in 641, they dispatched two armed expeditions into Nubia, reaching as far as Dongola, the capital of Makurra.

Neither strategy proved effective, leading to the creation of the baqt, a type of peace treaty, between 651 and 652. This lets the Nubian states keep their freedom. The baqt seems to have been a peace treaty and a swap of goods from Egypt and slaves from Nubia. 

Texts from the ninth and tenth centuries talk about wheat, drink (wine), horses, and cloth or clothes as some of the most important things. Up until the rule of Cyriacus of Makurra, relations with Islamic Egypt were mostly good. According to tradition, he entered Egypt in 747 and 748 to free the Alexandrian patriarch from the emir’s jail.

Because of the political backing of the patriarchate, this invasion may have been important in some way because of the patriarchate’s political backing. Later in Cyriacus’s reign, in 758, the Nubians didn’t pay the baqt, which caused a short-term rift in ties. Around the year 820, the Nubians stopped paying the baqt again. Caliph al-Mu’tasim instructed King Zacharias II of Makurra to pay the baqt and all of its past-due sums for fourteen years in 834.

In 835 and 836, Zacharias’s son George went to Baghdad and was able to reach an agreement with the Caliph. Both sides agreed to forgive the debts of the Baqt and refrain from attacking each other. Egypt and Nubia continued to get along peacefully in the first half of the tenth century. From this point on, burials and tombstones show that Muslims lived in Lower Nubia. 

But in the second half of the century, between 956 and 962, the Nubians launched two major offensives. They then kept control of a portion of Upper Egypt until the eleventh century. In 969, the Fatimids took over Egypt. During most of their time in power, they had good relationships with the Nubian Kingdoms. The Makurran rulers were even able to get involved in some Egyptian affairs. 

One king, most likely Solomon, helped the patriarch of Alexandria one time and worked with Egypt’s rulers by turning over Kanz ed-Dowla, the leader of an Arab-Beja tribe that had rebelled and run away to Nubia. 

Both secondary sources and first-hand historical data show that Egypt traded a lot with Makurra and some with ‘Alwah during this time. Indeed, Soba, the capital of ‘Alwah, saw the construction of a Muslim quarter. In 1171, Salah al-Din got rid of the Fatimids. 

In the same year, the king of Makurra attacked Egypt and took Aswan. He then moved north, either to steal things or to help the Fatimids, but the Makourran army had to leave. The following year, Salah ed-Din’s brother Shams ed-Dowla came to Nubia. 

They appear to have achieved two main goals: first, to punish them, and second, to seize control of the country, which they could use as a base if forced to leave Egypt. In the end, Shams ed-Dowla came to the conclusion that Nubia wasn’t right for this, and neither Salah al-Din nor his Ayyubid successors tried to take over Makurra. Makurra had good ties with Egypt’s later Ayyubid rulers, but those did not last long after the Mamluks took over in 1250. 

‘Alwah, or maybe its northernmost principality, el-Abwab, seems to have had better relationships with the Mamluks and sometimes helped them fight Makurra. But it’s clear that things started to go wrong at this point, which led to the fall of both Christian countries. One of these has to do with how the Mamluks treated the Egyptian nomadic groups badly. 

Many people relocated to Nubia or fled there under duress. Some tribes also sent their members to Nubia to support the troops stationed there between the late 1300s and early 1400s. Over the next three hundred years, they seem to have had many marriages with Nubians. 

Adams (1977, p. 458) says that the Mamluks had an effect that “tipped the balance of power in favor of the growing Islamic element in the population.” When the political and religious institutions in the Christian states started to fall apart, this balance became very important.

In 1268, King David removed his uncle Abu’l Izz Murtashkar, who had become a Muslim, from power and took over as king of Makurra. In 1272, David struck the port of Aydhab, which hurt Egypt’s sea trade routes. He then destroyed Aswan. The Mamluk Sultan Baybars launched an assault in 1276, removing David from power and putting Shakanda, who was also a nephew of Abu’l Izz Murtashkar, in charge. 

Shakanda was supposed to swear allegiance to Baybars in exchange for his help and the province of Maris (Nobatia) being given to him, but these terms don’t seem to have been followed. A number of Mamluk nominees held the throne of Makurra after that point.

Typically, they held power for a brief period before facing death or removal. From before 1304 to 1311, this happened to Kings Amay from 1311 to 1316 and 1323, and to Saif ed-Din Abdallah Barshambu from 1316 to 1317 or 1319. The last-named king was a Muslim. In 1317, he turned the throne hall of the palace at Old Dongola into a mosque, but it doesn’t look like he did much else to convert the state to Islam. 

In 1365, Egypt got involved with Nubian matters again when an embassy from the two rulers of a split Makurra came to ask for help fighting some nomad tribes. It was the sultan’s army and the Nubian army working together that beat them. Then, the king of Makurra moved his palace to Daw in Lower Nubia. 

The consecration of a bishop of Ibrim in 1372 marked the most recent known connection between Nubia and the patriarch of Alexandria. Trade dropped by a lot. As late as 1397, a king of “Nubia” tried to find safety in Cairo, but it looks like the kingdoms of Makurra and ‘Alwah were no longer together. Egypt and these Nubian states stopped having official formal ties at the turn of the century.

Also Read: How the Arabians Conquered and took over the Great Kingdom Of Egypt

The Scramble For Africa

The scramble for Africa south of the Sahara did not start in North Africa. The Maghrib had been an important part of the Mediterranean world for 3,000 years until the French came and changed everything. After the Napoleonic Wars, France could no longer try to take over Europe. By invading Algeria, the new government under Charles X attempted to revive the empire in 1830.

Arabs and Berbers joined together to fight the French, with ‘Abd al-Qadir (Abd el Kader) in charge. In 1807, he was born into a wealthy family in western Algeria. He went to school in Medina and then led the Sufi brotherhoods in a war against the French Christians when he returned to Algeria. 

It took him fifteen years of nonstop fighting before he gave up. 100,000 French soldiers from the Armée d’Afrique under General Thomas-Robert Bugeaud had destroyed Algeria. The war ended France’s hopes of becoming an empire, but it did train French officers called officiers soudanais. These officers later took over large parts of the Sahel and Savanna in western Sudan when the British were in control of the Nile Valley. 

In 1863–1879, Isma’il ibn Ibrahim Pasha (1830–1895) was khedive of Egypt until he was removed from power in 1879. He changed British interests in Africa. The Suez Canal opening in 1869 was a sign of his plan to modernize Egypt through public works projects and personal castles. It cut the long trip around Africa down to a quick trip next to it. 

Exaggerated cotton earnings during the American Civil War allowed people to spend a lot of money. This gave the government the money it needed for imperial adventures in Ethiopia and the Sudan. Isma’il sent two armed expeditions to Ethiopia in 1875 and 1876, but disaster wiped them out. This proved that he was bankrupt, and the Italians took over Massawa, Ethiopia’s Red Sea port. Europe wasn’t going to give up on its investments in Egypt, whether they were in cotton, railroads, or the canal. 

The Caisse de la Dette Publique, Isma’il’s British and French advisors, forced him to restructure his debt in 1876. By 1878, he couldn’t do that without giving up some of his dictatorial powers. When Isma’il refused, the government in 1879 sent him into exile, and European financial experts ran it. In September 1881, Colonel Ahmad Urabi (‘Arabi) Pasha and his Egyptian officers led an army that took back control of the government for Egypt. Liberal nationalists, Muslim conservatives, and the big owners all backed the army. 

After riots against Europeans in Alexandria on July 11, 1882, the British navy attacked. Urabi said he would take over the Suez Canal on July 19. On August 16, a British expeditionary force under the command of General Sir Garnet Wolseley arrived at Suez. On September 13, they destroyed the Egyptian army at Tall al-Kabir, which sped up the “Scramble” for Africa. 

The British didn’t want to take over Egypt, but they had to in order to protect Suez. They couldn’t leave the protection of foreign investments and their citizens to the defeated Egyptian nationalists. Instead, they had to put a government in Cairo in charge of that. 

The khediviate would stay in place, but the British would stay because their consul general, Sir Evelyn Baring (later Lord Cromer), told them to. They would clean up the government, protect the fallahin (peasants), make sure there was enough money for European bondholders, and build public works for the Egyptians. 

His plan to rebuild Egypt so that Cairo would be safe and secure and the Suez Canal would be stable depended on British troops being at the canal and British officials becoming more permanent in the Egyptian government by 1889. Egypt lost its freedom to Great Britain in 1882. In 1885, Egypt lost its kingdom in Sudan to Muhammad Ahmad ‘Abd Allah. In 1881, ‘Abd Allah called himself the expected Mahdi and promised to clean up the country’s religion and government after the Turkish rulers from Egypt had abused their power. 

His message brought together different ethnic groups in Sudan to form the Ansar (followers), who systematically destroyed every punishment mission sent against them. After taking over Egypt, the British were also in charge of protecting their empire in the Sudan against the Mahdists, who wanted to end the same kind of oppression that the British used to defend taking over Egypt. 

To fix this problem, the British government sent Charles George “Chinese” Gordon to Khartoum with unclear instructions that stopped being useful when the Ansar attacked the city. Gordon set up a strong defense, but on January 26, 1885, when a British relief force was coming, the Mahdi told his Ansar to attack the city. 

Gordon was beheaded, making him an instant English martyr. This made his fellow officers, the British people, and British lawmakers vow to get revenge for his death and the way the brutal Sudanese made Britain look like a weak power. In the “Scramble” for the Upper Nile, Gordon became the reason why Sudan had to be taken back. The Mahdi’s victory didn’t last long.

He passed away on June 22, 1885, but his replacement, Khalifa ‘Abd Allahi Muhammad Turshain, built on his work to make the Mahdist state independent. In June 1889, four years later, Lord Salisbury, the British prime minister, reluctantly agreed with his proconsul in Cairo that Egypt would need a more stable British presence to secure Suez in order to rebuild and take control of the Nile waters. 

This choice set off the “Scramble” in northeast Africa, which had effects that went far beyond the Nile area. After that, Lord Salisbury worked hard at diplomacy in Europe to stop any rivals who were trying to take over African land and put the Nile flow at risk. In 1890, Salisbury signed the Anglo-German (Heligoland) treaty, which gave Germany control of a small but important island in the North Sea in exchange for German rights to Lake Victoria. 

In 1891, he signed the Anglo-Italian deal, which said that Britain would not stop Italy from trying to take over Ethiopia as long as Italy promised not to mess with the Blue Nile. Britain thought the waters around the Nile, Cairo, and Suez were safe until January 20, 1893, when the new khedive, Abbas II, tried to show his freedom. A show of British military power quickly stopped him. 

Victor Prompt, a famous French hydrologist, gave a talk at the Egyptian Institute in Paris on the same day. This speech made France want to compete with Britain for control of the Nile and, eventually, Cairo and Suez. Along the rivers in the Congo area, the French moved up to Fashoda, where the Upper Nile meets the plains of Ethiopia. 

From the Atlantic to the Red Sea, the idea of a French kingdom was too good to pass up. At the start of the “Scramble” for northeast Africa, Britain supported Italy’s plans to become an empire as a possible partner in the Mediterranean and to stop France from making plans to take over Ethiopia. Emperor Menelik was very good at getting what he wanted from each side. He got weapons from the French to protect Ethiopia against the Italians and stayed neutral with the British when they wouldn’t agree to his ridiculous claims to the Nile below his mountains. 

On March 1, 1896, Menelik gathered 100,000 men at the village of Adua. Seventy of them were armed with firearms, and 46 pieces of artillery and 20,000 spearmen were also there. The Ethiopians defeated the Italian expeditionary force that was moving through steep slopes under the command of General Oreste Baratieri. The Ethiopians lost 17,000 people who were killed or hurt. The Italians lost 7,000 people who were killed, hurt, or taken, as well as their dream of building an empire in Africa. It was June 25, 1896, four months after that, that Captain Jean-Baptiste Marchand left France for Africa and Fashoda. 

Menelik was keeping an eye on three other French teams that were getting ready to march to the Nile in Addis Ababa. The “Race to Fashoda” ended the “scramble” for Africa that began when Khedive Isma’il was removed from power in 1879. However, after thirty years, a naval show in the harbor of Alexandria could no longer win control of the Nile for Suez and the kingdom. 

To keep the French out of the waters of the Nile, the British government cleared a railroad from Mombasa to Lake Victoria. When the railroad wasn’t built on time, they also gave the go-ahead for a military expedition from Uganda that never made it to Fashoda. To solve the problem for good, General H. H. Kitchener was sent up the Nile to beat the Khalifa and meet the French at Fashoda. 

His 25,000-man Anglo-Egyptian army beat the Khalifa’s 70,000-man Ansar army on the fields of Karari outside of Omdurman on September 2, 1898. Kitchener had finished getting payback for Gordon’s death in 1885, which made Queen Victoria and the people of Britain happy. 

On September 19, Kitchener and his fleet met Captain Marchand and his 125 Sénégalese soldiers, who were fighting at Fashoda. This made Lord Salisbury happy and kept the Nile and Suez Seas safe. Marchand went against what the French government told him to do after the “scramble” for the Nile, if not all of Africa.

Also Read: Cairo’s history

Cape Verde’s History

The small country of Cape Verde is in West Africa. It is made up of ten volcanic islands and five rocks. It is located 300 miles directly west of the most western point of Africa. There are two groups of islands in the chain.

Along with the islets Raso and Branco, the Barlevento group in the north is made up of Santo Antão, São Vincento, Santa Luzia (which is empty), São Nicolau, Sal, and Boa Vista. These islands are in the Sotavento group, which is in the south. They are Maio, São Tiago, Fogo, Brava, and the islets of Grande, Luís, Carneiro, and Cima. On the Sotavento Islands, Praia is the center and largest town. In the north, Mindelo is the largest town on São Vincente.

Most of the people there are Crioulo (Creole) or mestico, which comes from ties between slave owners and their female slaves in the past. It is thought that the people of Cape Verde have a society that is a mix of European and African traditions. Portuguese is the main language of Cape Verde. Crioulo, on the other hand, is the mother tongue and the official language. Crioulo is the language that defines Cape Verdean culture and language. It expresses the country’s saudade (soul).

In the 1600s, a language called Crioulo developed out of old Portuguese that had absorbed various African languages. At first, it was used as a common language for business between Portuguese and African slave traders. There isn’t enough proof to say for sure, but the Cape Verde Islands may have been viewed but not lived on before the Portuguese came.

Hoenicians, Moors (Arab-Berbers), and people from West Africa may have been to the islands.
In the fifth and fourth centuries BCE, Phoenician traders may have come by sea. In the tenth and eleventh centuries, the Moors may have arrived. Some Portuguese and Italian sailors working for Prince Henry “The Navigator” of Portugal were the first people to settle on the islands.

Some of the first people to reach the islands were Ca da Mosta, Diogo Gomes, Diogo Afonso, António, and Bartolemeu da Noli. This happened between 1455 and 1462. Early settlers, including Portuguese Jews, came to São Tiago in 1462 and built the first European village and church in the tropics. They called it Riberia Grande, which is now called Cidade Velha.

In the beginning, the Portuguese planned to use the islands as a port and a place to grow cotton and sugar. In 1495, the islands were made the crown property of Portugal. To work the land, Portugal began bringing in slaves from the coast of West Africa.

The Portuguese brought more than just slaves to Cape Verde. They also brought criminals, refugees, social outcasts, and a feudal system called “companhia.” At this point, Portuguese slave owners started having sexual contact with African slaves, which made the Crioulo society more diverse.

There were capitãos (chiefs), fidalgos (noblemen), cavaleiro-fidalgos (noble knights), almoxarites (tax collectors), degradados (convicts), exterminados (exiles), and lancados (outcasts) in the feudal social system. Slaves were at the bottom of the feudal social order. They were divided into three groups: escravos novos or bocales (raw slaves), escravos naturais (slaves born in Cape Verde), and ladinos (baptized or “civilized” slaves).

In the salt flats of Sal, slaves were often used to clear land, work on the cotton, sugar, and coffee farms, and gather plant dyes like indigo, orchil, and urzella. Badius, who were runaway slaves, farmed land in the interior and kept some of their African identity (that is, they were less integrated into Portuguese society).

In the end, the morgado or capela system of land ownership took over from the companhia system. A morgados was a large piece of privately owned land that was passed down according to the concept of primogeniture. The morgado method was done away with in 1863, when land reforms took over. As the slave trade grew in the 1600s, the Cape Verde Islands became an important link between Africa, Europe, and the Americas.

The archipelago quickly became the hub of a three-way trade system. It sent slaves, ivory, and gold to the Americas and Europe on a regular basis in return for cheap manufactured goods, horses, rum, and cloth. Pirates from Spain, England, the Netherlands, and France were drawn to the islands because of the wealth that came from the transatlantic slave trade.

During the next few hundred years, these pirates and foreign raiders (William Hawkins in the 1540s, Francis Drake in 1585, and the French in 1722) attacked the islands many times, especially the city of Riberia Grande. Smugglers also liked the islands. They used panos, which were trade cloths, as money (two panos were equal to one iron bar), which hurt the Portuguese Crown’s selling monopoly.

Panos were made from cotton by woolen spinners and weavers, who then painted them with orchil and urzella. Even though they failed, people tried to stop the cheating and smuggling. On the other hand, in the 1680s, selling panos was illegal and could lead to death. As a result of the sad end of the transatlantic slave trade in 1876, the Cape Verde Islands once again became a major hub for trade in the late 1800s.

When steam-powered ships came along, the islands (at Mindelo) were used as a refueling stop on the way across the Atlantic. Before World War II, submarine cable stations also drew a lot of ships. Even though there was increased interest in the islands, the people of Cape Verde were still going through drought, famine, and bad government.

A lot of people from Cape Verde worked as tenant farmers or sharecroppers. Others went to São Tomé and Príncipe to work as farmhands, and a lot of them joined fishing and sealing ships. Tens of thousands of people from Cape Verde came to the United States on their own to work as longshoremen or in cranberry bogs and factories between the late 1800s and early 1900s. Most of them went to southeastern New England.

At the start of the 20th century, more and more people in both Cape Verde and Guinea-Bissau were against the Portuguese crown. When fascists took over the Portuguese government in 1926, they added a colonial strategy to the constitution. As a result, anticolonialist groups grew in Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde.

Dissidents and nationalists from Guinea-Bissau, Cape Verde, Angola, and Portugal were put in prison camps at Tarrafal, São Tiago (also known as Chão Bom). These camps were notorious for being very harsh. Baltazar Lopes, Jorge Barbosa, and Manuel Lopes founded the literary claridade (calrity) movement in 1936, which was where the first nationalist ideas emerged. People in the Claridade movement spoke out against racism, fascism, and the rule of Portugal over Africa.

To stop the rise of nationalism, Portugal changed Cape Verde’s position in 1951 from a colony to an overseas province. Nationalists reacted by creating the secret Partido Africano da Independência da Guiné e Cabo Verde (PAIGC), a party started in 1956 in Guinea-Bissau by Amilcar Cabral and a few others. The goal of the PAIGC was to free Guinea-Bissau and Cape Verde from Portuguese rule. In 1958, the PAIGC called for a number of general strikes.

In 1959, a strike in Guinea-Bissau’s Pijiguiti turned into a killing spree. Still, the PAIGC came to the conclusion that the colonial state’s violence could only be stopped by violence against violence and armed fighting. So, the PAIGC gave up peaceful ways to protest and fought a war to free their country. The armed battle began in 1963, and most of the fighting took place in rural Guinea-Bissau.

Because of problems with logistics, the PAIGC didn’t attack the Cape Verde Islands. As the PAIGC made steady combat progress, the Portuguese fought back with bombing attacks that used white phosphorous and napalm from the US and the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. By 1972, the PAIGC held most of Guinea-Bissau, even though there were Portuguese troops in towns that were fortified.

Amilcar Cabral was killed on January 20, 1973, but the PAIGC quickly stepped up its attacks on the Portuguese military, which was already weak, and on September 24, 1973, independence was announced. The fascist Portuguese government was overthrown on April 25, 1974, after this statement. This caused the new Portuguese government to start talks with the PAIGC about decolonization.

In December 1974, Portugal and the PAIGC decided to share power for a short time. South Africa got its freedom on September 24, 1974, and Cape Verde got it on July 5, 1975. The Republic of Cape Verde’s first president was Aristides Pereira, and its first prime minister was Pedro Pires. The original constitution called for formal unification with Guinea-Bissau, but a coup in November 1980 made things difficult between the two countries.

Soon after, Pedro Pires started the Partido Africano da Independência de Cabo Verde (PAICV), giving up on the idea of uniting with Guinea-Bissau. The PAICV set up a one-party government and ran Cape Verde from the time it became independent until 1990. The first votes with more than one party were held in 1991. The Movimento para Democracia (MPD) took over from the PAICV leaders. Pereira was replaced by António Mascarenas Monteiro, and Pires was succeeded by Carlos Veiga.

In 1992, a new constitution was passed that set up a multiparty government. The MPD got most of the votes in the 1995 elections, which were seen as free and fair by monitors from both inside and outside of Vietnam. In 2001, Pedro Pires and Jóse Marie Neves, both from the PAICV, were elected president and prime minister, respectively. This was another change of guard.

Cape Verde is a part of the UN, the Organization of African Unity, and PALOP, which is a group of African countries where Portuguese is the main language. With help from the World Bank, Cape Verde has worked on a number of projects to improve its infrastructure. These have included building up cities, managing water resources, and improving schools.

Also Read: Great Zimbabwe History

History Of Cairo Egypt

The area around Cairo has a much longer past than the city itself, which didn’t start to form until the Middle Ages. Ancient Egypt had several major cities, and Memphis was one of them. It was built on land that is now part of the city of Cairo.

After taking over Egypt, the Romans built a city nearby that they called Babylon. It is now in the Misr al-Qadimah neighborhood of Cairo. The next stop was the Arab who conquered Egypt and introduced Islam there, ‘Amr ibn al-‘As, who built the city of al-Fustat.

But it was the Fatimid caliph al-Mu’izz who built the modern city, whose name means “the victorious” in Arabic. After being built in 969 and becoming the capital of the Fatimid Empire a few years later, Cairo has always been the political and economic center of Egypt and a very important strategic city.

The Mamluk Sultanate ruled from 1260 to 1516, and Cairo was its capital. The city did very well under Mamluk rule. By 1340, the city had grown to have half a million people living in it, making it the biggest city on three continents. It was also the most important place to learn in the Islamic world because it was home to al-Azhar University.

It was also a good place to make money from the trade of spices from Asia to the Mediterranean. The City did not have a good time during the last few years of Mamluk rule, though. There were a lot of deaths in Cairo in 1348 because of the bubonic plague. Soon after, Vasco da Gama, a Portuguese explorer, successfully sailed from Europe to India, opening a seaway to the east that let the spice trade go around Cairo. This caused economic losses.

When the Ottoman Empire took over Egypt in 1517, Cairo was one of many provincial capitals in the bigger Ottoman Empire, which was run out of Istanbul. This did not help City’s situation either. For several hundred years, the city wasn’t very important. When Napoleon’s troops invaded Egypt in 1798, there were less than 300,000 people living in Cairo.

In the 1830s, though, the city began to grow again thanks to the work of Muhammad ‘Ali, who was Ottoman governor of Egypt from 1805 until his death in 1849 and tried to bring the city up to date. As part of Muhammad ‘Ali’s plan to modernize Egypt, irrigation, roads, agriculture, schooling, and the military were all made better. This was good for Cairo’s economy and population.

But it wasn’t until the khedive Isma’il ruled from 1863 to 1879 that Cairo became a truly modern city. Isma’il wanted to make Cairo a European city. He started spending a lot of money that Egypt couldn’t afford, which added to the country’s huge foreign debt and gave Britain a reason to take it over in 1882.

He told French engineers to plan the building of a new city next to Cairo in the Middle Ages. He worked hard to build the neighborhoods of Abdin, al-Isma’iliyyah, and al-Ezbekiyyah, which are in the middle of modern-day Cairo. After the British took over Egypt in 1882, these new areas became the center of colonial Cairo.

In the 20th and 21st centuries, the city went through more changes. The biggest was a huge increase in population, mostly from people moving from rural areas, and higher total population growth rates.

This large influx of people has made the city too crowded to handle. As a result, shantytowns have sprung up on the edges of the city, people have moved into the huge northern and southern cemetery complexes (known as the City of the Dead), and new suburbs, satellite towns, and planned communities have been built. Some examples are Heliopolis, al-Ma’adi, the Tenth of Ramadan City, and the Sixth of October City.

Still, the city, which has been called the “mother of the world” for hundreds of years, is still the heart of Egypt. Misr (Egypt) means both Egypt and Cairo to Egyptians, which shows how important the capital city is. In 1919, there was a short-lived uprising against British rule in the city. Three years later, Egypt became officially independent, though Britain still had some rights in Egypt, such as stationing troops there.

After World War II, the city was also very important in more uprisings against British rule, which went on until after the 1952 revolution. In January 1952, riots broke out in Cairo, targeting places of “foreign” influence like the British Turf Club, the Shepherd’s Hotel (which had been a hub of European social life in Cairo for a long time), movie theaters that showed foreign films, nightclubs, bars, and many businesses owned by Jews.

Later that year, on July 23, there was a revolution, which was really a military coup. It got rid of the corrupt and hated King Faruq and put in his place the good-natured General Muhammad Naguib. However, Gamal Abdel Nasser, who planned the coup, kept real power and soon took over the government by himself.

After the 1956 Suez War, Nasser’s policies of seclusion and “Egyptianization” had the same effect on Cairo as they did on Alexandria: many of Cairo’s foreign and minority people chose to leave the country. After the Camp David Accords were signed in 1979, Egypt was no longer at war with Israel. This was good for Egypt, but it was bad for Cairo’s reputation among Arab cities.

A lot of Arab countries cut diplomatic ties with Egypt, and the League of Arab States moved its offices from Cairo to Tunis. This caused a lot of Arab diplomats to leave Cairo. However, relations have been fixed since then. About 1,000 people died in an earthquake in Cairo in 1992 when badly built high-rise buildings and homes that were put together quickly fell down.

Today, close to 20 million people live in City. As the year-round capital of Egypt (since Alexandria was no longer used as the summer capital after the 1952 revolution), the center of business and industry, the home of foreign embassies, and once again the headquarters of the League of Arab States, Cairo is the political, strategic, diplomatic, economic, and cultural key to Egypt. It has been this way since the Middle Ages.

Also Read: How the Arabians Conquered and took over the Great Kingdom Of Egypt