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Cairo is not a Pharaonic city, though the presence of the Pyramids leads many to believe otherwise. At the time the Pyramids were built, Egypt's capital was Memphis, 22km (13.5mi) south of the Giza plateau.
The core foundations of the city of Cairo (then called Al-Qahira) were laid in 969 by the Fatimids, an early Islamic dynasty from North Africa. There had been earlier settlements, notably the Roman fortress of Babylon, and Fustat, which was established by the Arab army that conquered Egypt for Islam in 642. But the Fatimids established the core of Cairo as it is today; their mosque and university of Al-Azhar is still Egypt's main centre of Islamic study, while the three great gates of Bab an-Nasr, Bab al-Futuh and Bab Zuweila continue to straddle two of Old Cairo's main thoroughfares.
Under the rule of subsequent dynasties Cairo swelled and burst its walls, but at heart it remained a medieval city for 900 years. It wasn't until the reign of Ismail, grandson of Mohammed Ali, in the mid-19th century that Cairo started to change in any significant way. Before the 1860s Cairo extended west only as far as what is today Midan Opera. The future site of modern central Cairo was then a swampy plain subject to the annual flooding of the Nile.
In 1863, when the French-educated Ismail came to power, he was determined to upgrade the image of his capital, which he believed could only be done by dismissing what had gone before and starting afresh. For 10 years the former marsh became one vast building site as Ismail invited architects from Belgium, France and Italy to design and build a new European-style Cairo beside the old Islamic city. During his reign the Suez Canal was finished and opened with much fanfare, and the city attracted the attention of the whole world. In the heady times that followed, tourism and business boomed, and Cairo almost had the character of a gold-rush town. European bankers, with the connivance of their governments, bestowed lavish loans at insatiable rates of interest upon Ismail for his grandiose schemes. In 1882 it all came to an end when the British stepped in and announced that until Egypt could repay its debts, they were taking control.
The 70-year British occupation of Cairo came to an abrupt halt with the Revolution of 1952. Since the Revolution, Cairo has grown spectacularly in population and urban planners have struggled to keep pace. In the 1960s and 1970s the west bank of the Nile was concreted over with new suburbs like Medinat Mohandiseen (Engineers' City) and Medinat Sahafayeen (Journalists' City), while expansion continued north, most notably in the hideous form of Medinat Nasr (Nasr City). More recently, population pressure has meant that the rocky Muqattam Hills - which had traditionally halted the city's eastward spread - have been leap-frogged, and the once-barren desert is now a vast and messy construction site for a series of satellite cities.
Cairo has seen significant, if agonisingly slow, improvements during Mubarak's 20 years in power. The changes, however, fall well short of keeping pace with the litany of woes - overcrowding, collapsing infrastructure, poverty, pollution - afflicting the overstretched metropolis.
The city's major sources of revenue, the Pyramids, Egyptian Museum and Islamic monuments, are also under threat from pollutant-accelerated decay, neglect and downright bad management. While Cairo has five millennia worth of glorious and rich history, the future of the city looks far less grand. Nevertheless, in recent times the numbers of tourists in Cairo have been at an all-time high and hotel prices at a similar peak.
