The Greater Cairo metropolitan area is the 12th-largest in the world by population with over The area that would become Cairo was part of ancient Egypt , as the Giza pyramid complex and the ancient cities of Memphis and Heliopolis are near-by.
Located near the Nile Delta , [ 6 ] [ 7 ] the predecessor settlement was Fustat following the Muslim conquest of Egypt in next to an existing ancient Roman fortress, Babylon. Subsequently, Cairo was founded by the Fatimid dynasty in It later superseded Fustat as the main urban centre during the Ayyubid and Mamluk periods 12thβ16th centuries.
Cairo has since become a longstanding centre of political and cultural life, and is titled "the city of a thousand minarets " for its preponderance of Islamic architecture. Cairo's historic center was awarded World Heritage Site status in Cairo has the oldest and largest film and music industry in the Arab world , as well as Egypt's oldest institution of higher learning, Al-Azhar University. Many international media, businesses, and organizations have regional headquarters in the city; the Arab League has had its headquarters in Cairo for most of its existence.
Cairo, like many other megacities , suffers from high levels of pollution and traffic. The Cairo Metro , opened in , is the oldest metro system in Africa, [ 11 ] and ranks amongst the fifteen busiest in the world, [ 12 ] with over 1 billion [ 13 ] annual passenger rides. There are a number of Coptic names for the city. Some argue that it was the name of an Egyptian settlement upon which Cairo was built, but it is rather doubtful as this name is not attested in any Hieroglyphic or Demotic source, although some researchers, like Paul Casanova, view it as a legitimate theory.
The area around present-day Cairo had long been a focal point of Ancient Egypt due to its strategic location at the junction of the Nile Valley and the Nile Delta regions roughly Upper Egypt and Lower Egypt , which also placed it at the crossing of major routes between North Africa and the Levant. However, the origins of modern Cairo are generally traced back to a series of settlements in the first millennium AD. Around the turn of the fourth century, [ 29 ] as Memphis was continuing to decline in importance, [ 30 ] the Romans established a large fortress along the east bank of the Nile.
