Timeline of Cairo

Memphis is founded. The capital of a newly unified Egypt is established twenty kilometres south of the future Cairo, and remains the country’s chief city for most of the Old Kingdom.

The Step Pyramid. Imhotep builds Djoser’s stepped tomb at Saqqara — the oldest large cut-stone building in the world, and the first pyramid.

The Great Pyramid. Khufu’s pyramid at Giza is completed at 146.6 metres and remains the tallest structure built by human beings for the next 3,800 years.

Heliopolis at its height. The centre of the sun cult, north-east of the modern city, is one of the largest temple complexes in Egypt. Almost nothing survives above ground.

Alexander takes Egypt. The Ptolemies rule for three centuries from Alexandria; Memphis declines.

Egypt becomes a Roman province. After Actium and the deaths of Antony and Cleopatra, Egypt is annexed and becomes Rome’s granary.

The Coptic Church is founded. Tradition attributes the introduction of Christianity to Egypt to St Mark. By the fourth century the country is largely Christian.

The fortress of Babylon. Diocletian fortifies the point where the Nile meets the Red Sea canal. Its walls still stand around Coptic Cairo.

Amr ibn al-As founds Fustat. The Arab conquest brings a garrison town beside the Roman fortress, and the oldest mosque in Africa. Fustat is Egypt’s capital for three centuries.

The Abbasids build al-Askar. A new administrative town is laid out just north of Fustat. Nothing of it survives.

Ibn Tulun founds al-Qata’i. Sent to govern for the Abbasids, he stops remitting taxes and builds his own capital north again.

The Mosque of Ibn Tulun. Completed in brick and stucco with a spiral minaret copied from Samarra. It is the only surviving building of al-Qata’i and the oldest mosque in Cairo in its original form.

The Fatimids found al-Qahira. An Isma’ili Shia dynasty from North Africa conquers Egypt and builds a walled royal city — the Victorious — from which Cairo takes its name.

Al-Azhar is built. The Fatimid congregational mosque is completed in 972 and teaching begins in 975, making it by most reckonings the oldest continuously operating university in the world.

The stone walls and gates. Bab al-Futuh, Bab al-Nasr and Bab Zuweila are rebuilt in stone by Armenian architects. All three still stand.

Fustat is burned. The vizier Shawar orders the old capital destroyed to deny it to the approaching Crusaders. It never recovers.

Saladin. Salah al-Din abolishes the Fatimid caliphate, restores Sunni Islam, opens the royal city to the public and merges it with Fustat.

The Citadel is begun. Saladin fortifies a spur of the Mokattam hills. It remains the seat of government in Egypt for nearly seven hundred years.

The Mamluks take power. Slave soldiers seize the sultanate and hold it for 267 years. Cairo becomes the largest city west of China.

Baghdad falls. The Mongols destroy the Abbasid capital, and Cairo becomes the undisputed centre of the Islamic world.

The Black Death. Plague kills perhaps a third of Egypt’s population. The estates of the dead pass to the state and help fund the great Mamluk building programme.

Sultan Hassan. The mosque-madrasa is built at ruinous expense, with a school for each of the four schools of law. Hassan is murdered before it is finished.

Qaytbay’s complex. The carved stone dome in the northern cemetery is completed — the high point of Mamluk architecture, and now on the Egyptian one-pound note.

The Ottoman conquest. Selim I defeats the Mamluks and Egypt becomes a province. Cairo declines relatively, which is partly why so much medieval fabric survives.

Napoleon. The French win the Battle of the Pyramids and occupy Cairo. Nelson destroys their fleet at Aboukir; the expedition leaves in 1801, but its 167 scholars produce the Description de l’Égypte and found Egyptology.

Muhammad Ali takes power. An Albanian officer in the Ottoman army becomes governor and rules until 1848, building a modern state and effectively founding modern Egypt.

The massacre of the Mamluks. Around 500 Mamluk leaders are invited to the Citadel and shot in a narrow passage as they leave, ending their power after five and a half centuries.

The Muhammad Ali Mosque. Built at the Citadel in a deliberately Ottoman style, on the highest point in Cairo. The clock in its courtyard, a gift from France, has never worked.

The Suez Canal opens. Khedive Ismail builds an opera house for the celebrations and commissions Verdi; Aida premieres there two years later.

Downtown is built. Ismail lays out a European city west of the medieval one, with boulevards and Haussmann-style blocks, and bankrupts Egypt doing it.

The British occupation. Britain intervenes after the Urabi revolt and stays, in one form or another, until 1956.

The Egyptian Museum opens. The pink building on what becomes Tahrir Square is the world’s first purpose-built archaeological museum.

Revolution. A nationwide rising against British rule leads to nominal independence in 1922 under a monarchy.

Tutankhamun. Howard Carter opens the tomb at Luxor. Clearing it takes ten years and the contents come to Cairo.

The Free Officers. A military coup deposes King Farouk. The monarchy is abolished the following year and the republic declared.

Suez. Nasser nationalises the canal; Britain, France and Israel invade and are forced to withdraw under American and Soviet pressure. Nasser emerges as the leading figure in the Arab world.

Cairo Tower. The 187-metre concrete lotus opens on Gezira — funded, by persistent account, with money the CIA had intended as a personal inducement to Nasser.

The Six-Day War. Catastrophic defeat by Israel. Nasser resigns and is brought back by mass demonstrations; he dies in 1970.

The opera house burns. The 1869 Khedivial Opera House is destroyed by fire. Cairo has no opera house for seventeen years; the site becomes a car park.

The October War. Egyptian forces cross the Suez Canal. The war leads eventually to the Camp David Accords and the return of Sinai.

Sadat is assassinated. Shot at a military parade four years after making peace with Israel. Hosni Mubarak succeeds him and rules for thirty years.

Mahfouz wins the Nobel. Naguib Mahfouz, who set the Cairo Trilogy in the streets around Khan el-Khalili, becomes the only Arabic-language writer to win the literature prize.

Al-Azhar Park opens. The Aga Khan Trust turns a 500-year-old rubbish mound into thirty hectares of garden, uncovering a buried stretch of Saladin’s wall in the process.

Tahrir. Eighteen days of mass protest centred on the square force Mubarak from power. A human chain forms around the Egyptian Museum to protect it.

Morsi is removed. The elected president is deposed by the military after mass protests. Abdel Fattah el-Sisi becomes president the following year.

The New Administrative Capital. Construction begins on a new government city forty kilometres east in the desert, to which ministries have since been relocating.

The Pharaohs’ Golden Parade. Twenty-two royal mummies are moved from Tahrir to the National Museum of Egyptian Civilisation in a televised night procession with a 21-gun salute.

The Grand Egyptian Museum. After nearly two decades of construction and repeatedly revised dates, the museum at Giza opens in phases, bringing the complete Tutankhamun collection together for the first time.