The Palimpsest of Cairo

Abstract

Cairo is an overwhelming, intense, and unforgettable city that imprints immediately upon anyone who has visited or lived there. The city itself is a result of the impressions and marks left by two millennia of settlements, conquests, and immigration. Three books recently published cover different layers of this city, and within each layer are multiples of layers of history impressing on each other and revealing a most complex and intertwined amalgam of histories evidenced in the architecture extant today. All three books not only center around works from Cairo, but the contributors and authors have all lived in this city of a “thousand minarets” for certain periods of time. Just as Nagib Mahfouz’s works bring to life the multifaceted city in novel form, creating characters that are never forgotten, so to do these books begin to bring to life and to communicate some of the fantastic histories that can be read from the buildings that mark the skyline and can never be forgotten.