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Overview

Acutely observed and enthralling history of one of the world's great cities is once more available in a new edition. Desmond Stewart begins with Memphis, the first capital of ancient Egypt, then takes the reader through fifty-five hectic centuries of urban life and varying fortunes to today's teeming Cairo. Employing a keen understanding of human nature, Stewart surveys the vicissitudes of the city, and makes sense of its highlights and lowlights, its times of glory and its times of misery, its heroic leaders and its cowardly tyrants. Sometimes a provincial outpost, sometimes an imperial capital, plunging from pinnacles of wealth, patronage, and achievement to sloughs of famine and cannibalism and rising again, Cairo - whose name means 'the Triumphant' - has changed and survived, and remains an astonishing and remarkable city.