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Physical Landscape and Facts

Cairo, which is the primate city of Egypt, is an Islamic city located in along the river nile in Egypt. Islam is what binds the region together. Religion impacts all aspects of the cultural enviornment. The population is 90% Islam and about 10% coptic christians. The impact is so great in fact that the legal system, and government, has two distinct branhches. There is the Islamic courts, and then there are the Coptic. An Islamic city is basically an amalgam of different cultures and religions. The city contains elements that existed long before the religion of Islam. Cairo is also a middle eastern city, one type of pre industrial city that has shown much resilency. Cairo has been one of the most important centers of power and culture throught the Islamic period. Today it serves as a focus of the arab world.

It is a desert city which owes its life to the river nile. In fact if you were to wander 10 miles east or west of this famous would die of thirst. Cairo is also bounded by two natural boundaries. The first is the nile on teh west with the pyrimids beyond it, and the second is to the east lie the muqattum hills and the citadel of Saladin.

There are as of 1990 approximatley 12-14 million people living in Cairo, but with a huge growth rate of almost 20000 a day, that number is sure to have grown since.

To give you an idea of its immense size, as of 1990, no other egyptian city was close to 1 million people.

Cairo is associated most commly with its neighbor monuments, the pyrimids of Gyza.

 

The most famous monuments of cairo are the Citadel of Saladin, and the Muhamad Ali Mosgque. This mosque is a central feature of Cairo

www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/pyramid/explore/age.htm

The landscape is mostly beige with what appears to be natural hills all around due to ruined older cities covered with dust. The weather is also hot. If you stray to far from teh nile, you will feel the effect of teh dessert sun almost immediatly. Also due to the nature of the dessert city, it only rains a few months out of the year. To find out what the weather is like now, click here.

Let us begin with Cairo's History

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