Early 19 Century Cairo
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3
At the time of Bonaparte's landing the population of Egypt was about two and a
half million, which was a
third of what it was estimated to have been in the days of the Pharaohs and hardly more
than a tenth of
what it is at present. The people were a mixed lot. Far away in
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Upper Egypt the Nubian tribes clung to
their strips of vegetation along the river bank and in the cultivated oases.
Provincial governors sent
out from Cairo gathered taxes from them and maintained a rough and ready sort of administration, but for
the most part life went by on the tipper Nile in ignorance and solitude.
The Bedouin who roamed the
intervening deserts that formed fourteen-fifteenths of Egypt were also very largely a law unto themselves,
and cannot have numbered more than a few tens of thousands. By far the largest part of the population was
huddled into the delta. Apart from the Mamelukes, whom we must consider in a moment, the delta population
consisted of about 1,750,000 fellaheen, the indigenous natives who cultivated the soil and formed the
labouring population of the cities; about 150,000 Copts - Egyptians who worshipped Christ and fulfilled
more or less the role of the Parsecs in India, as money-lenders, traders and government officials - and
finally the foreigners. These last numbered perhaps 200,000 and lived almost entirely in the cities.
They included Turks (the great majority), Greeks, Armenians, Jews, Syrians and a handful of French traders
who, at the first news of Bonaparte's landing, were interned. The only two cities of any consequence were
Cairo and Alexandria, and Alexandria at this time had sunk to the nadir of its fortunes. Of its ancient
glory - of its reputed 4,000 palaces, its theatres, temples and monuments that had once made it second
only to Rome in the Roman Empire - hardly anything remained.
Pompey's Pillar still stood, and the walls
still rose to a height of forty feet in some places, but for the rest all had sunk into dust and rubble,
the canal from the Nile had silted up, and the inhabitants, decimated by repeated plagues, had dwindled
to less than 10,000. Browne, the English traveller who visited the city in 1792, saw, 'Heaps of rubbish
are on all sides visible, whence every shower of rain, not to mention the industry of the natives in
digging, discovers pieces of precious marble, and sometimes ancient coins and fragments of sculpture.'
Denon, who got into the city on the heels of the French assault, says he found the houses shut up, the
streets deserted except for a few ragged women trailing about like ghosts among the ruins, and a
universal silence broken only by the cries of the kites. Even Pompey's Pillar seen from close to was
not very impressive.
Cairo, on the other hand, was a flourishing place; after Constantinople it was the most important city in the Near East,
with a population of about 250,000 people. Since it was first founded over a thousand years before it had been rebuilt
several times, and the present city (variously known as Masr, Misr, El-Kahira or Grand Cairo) stood on the site of an
ancient Roman fortress. It lay a little distance from the right bank of the river under the cover of the Mokattam Hills,
and was ringed by high walls and dominated by a citadel. The skyline, seen from a distance, had romantic aspects: the domes
and minarets of 300 mosques rose from the smoke of cooking fires, and the palm trees and cultivated fields along the river
bank gave the place a placid and rather rural air.
The citadel, built by Saladin in the twelfth century, was a fine
complex of dun-coloured battlements, and in the desert beyond, on the opposite side of the river, one descried the
pyramids. Seen from closer at hand, however, these noble prospects disintegrated. Except for the large open squares
such as the Esbekiah, which were flooded and thronged with boats during the. annual inundation of the Nile, the city
was a warren of narrow unpaved streets and non-descript Turkish houses covering about three square miles. Rubbish lay
about on every side, the haunt of scavenging dogs and cats, and in the worst slums it was hard to say which were the
ruins of fallen buildings and which the hovels of the present generation. `Not a single fine street,' Denon cries in
despair, `not a single beautiful building.... They build as little as they can help; they never repair anything.'
The mosques, crowded with pilgrims living in their outer courtyards, cannot have been very sanitary places, and the
bazaars, roofed over with canopies of straw or linen, were both hot and smelly. Browne speaks of `the polluted dust'.
Yet no one with any love for oriental life could resist this place. The day began before dawn when the mueddins
(many of them chosen because they were blind and thus unable to see down into the private houses) roused the
people with their first call to the mosques: `Come to prayer. Come to security. God is most great.
' Within an
hour - that first fresh hour of the Egyptian morning - the life of the city spilled itself out into the streets,
the bazaars and the coffee-houses, and at every turn the passer-by was bound to come on a spectacle of some kind:
a marriage or a funeral, an impromptu performance of strolling players in the square, a well-to-do merchant trotting
along on his ass with a slave running in front to clear the way, a string of camels thrusting through the crowds
with their heads held high and disdainfully in the air. There was a constant passage of street-vendors shouting up
to the balconies overhead, and of water-carriers with goatskins slung round their shoulders, and a hullabaloo of
shouts and cries filled the air: `Ya bint; dahrak,' 'Watch thy back, daughter,' 'Ya efendee,' `Take care,' `O consoler
of the embarrassed, my supper must be thy gift' - this last from the innumerable beggars whom one refused by replying
with some such phrase as `God will sustain'.
Part 2
Part 3
Extract from “The Blue Nile”, Written by Alan Moorehead. Westerham Press Ltd Kent, London: 1972.
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