(As close as I can get to a spooky story for Halloween this year)

The down side of traveling through a foreign country with a tour is that occasionally your guide mentions something fascinating in passing that is not part of the day’s tour. It is never mentioned again, and the curious history nerd is left to find out more on her own. Case in point: on our way to the Step Pyramid at Sakkara, our guide gestured and said, more or less, “On the left[1] is the City of the Dead. It is a complex of historic Islamic cemeteries[2] where thousands of families live in and among centuries old tombs and mausoleums.” My ears perked up. And then we moved on.[3]

Photo credit Daniel Nussbaum

The City of the Dead is huge: four square miles in the original core of the city that encircle the Cairo Citadel to the north and south. The earliest section of the necropolis dates from 642 CE, when Muslim Arabs led by Amr ibn al-As, one of the companions of Muhammad, conquered Egypt. It reached its height during the period when the Mamluks  ruled Egypt, from the thirteenth through the fifteenth centuries. It contains the graves of common people as well as elaborate mausoleums and tomb complexes built by Cairo’s elite.

People have always lived among the tombs. In the earliest periods, most of the living inhabitants had jobs related to the necropolis: grave diggers, the craftsmen who built the more ornate structures, tomb custodians, and Sufi mystics and scholars who studied in religious complexes attached to some of the most important mausoleums. Over time, small urban settlements in the area, and their residents, were absorbed by the necropolis, creating pockets of residential neighborhoods among the tombs.

Beginning in the late 19th century, the use of the cemeteries by the living increased as a result of rapid urbanization and housing shortages. Some squatted in tombs. Some moved into their own families’ tombs, particularly after the destruction of the 1992 earthquake. More constructed unofficial housing wherever they could find space.

In the course of learning more about the area, I discovered that the City of the Dead is a wonderful place to take a walking tour, with no aggressive vendors or souvenir shops trying to sell you fake papyrus bookmarks[4] and other tchotchokes. There are restored mosques, mausoleums and other medieval Islamic architecture to explore, street murals, and a cultural center that hosts artsy events and concerts, as well as walking tours with local guides. It’s also a chance to see Egyptian life up close in a way that our tour didn’t manage.

Maybe I need to go back to Cairo after all.

[1] Or possibly on the right.

[2] Many of the sources I looked at described the region as a group of cemeteries and necropolises. I immediately headed down a little rabbit hole to find out what the difference is between the two. As best I can tell, a necropolis is a large elaborate cemetery, usually attached to an ancient city.

[3] Over the coming days, we were introduced to many examples of people living in or near the ruins of ancient temples that had been half-buried by the sand. And why not? Ancient monuments were really well built—thanks to the back-breaking labor of thousands.

Moreover, stone is hard to come by in the desert. Most of the stone used in ancient Egypt was cut from sandstone quarries in the Silsila Mountains (Gebel Silsila) on either side of the Nile and then floated down river to Luxor. Gebel Silsila was also an important center for the cult of the Nile. The ancient Egyptians made sacrifices at this point of the river at the time of the yearly floods to ensure the fertility of the land. As a result, the quarries are home to shrines of all sizes and memorial stelae.

The west bank of Gebel Silsila is open to tourists. Alas, we saw it only in passing from the boat. (See downside of traveling with a tour, above)

But I digress.

[4] More on papyrus in a later post.