What is the capital of Egypt?

Cairo stands at the hinge of Egypt, where the narrow Nile valley opens into the broad delta, and whoever controls that point controls the movement of goods and people through the whole country. Settlements have clustered there for millennia, from ancient Memphis nearby to the Roman fortress of Babylon, but the city proper was founded in the tenth century by the Fatimids, who laid out a walled royal enclosure whose name means the victorious. Under the Ayyubids and Mamluks it became the leading city of the Islamic world, with a citadel on the Muqattam hills and a dense medieval core of mosques, markets and madrasas that still stands. Its position also explains its modern shape: unable to spread onto irrigated farmland without swallowing it, the metropolis has pushed out into the desert instead, and the Giza pyramids now sit on the edge of the built-up area rather than isolated in sand.

Egypt has been developing a new administrative city in the desert east of Cairo to relieve pressure on the old centre.