Egypt in the 10th and 11th Centuries

The martial epitaph wasn't very apposite, for Kafur, audacious as he was, cannot be accounted as a successful cosmopolitan, in spite of two triumphs in his before days in Syria. It was to the credit of his statesmanship and his officers that the whole of the realm, now reaching the northern frontier of Syria and including the Higaz with the holy cities of Mekka and Medina, was bore on in undiminished successfulness and rarely ruffled peace passim his regency and reign, and this despite several bad Niles and consequent Moslems, fateful earthquakes, and a calamitous fire which consumed 1700 houses in Misr in 954.

The big black castrate knew how to keep order. Unhappily, like biggest autocrats, he left no heir, and the weakness of the authorities of the new prince, the babe grandchild of the Ikhshid, asked for the invasion, which the Fatimid caliphs had long been preparing.

We have no verbal description worth citing of the city of Misr during this auspicious period. The traveller Ibn-Hawkal gives a abbreviated account of it a trifle later (978), and appraisals its size as about a third of Baghdad. He notes its handsome markets, its constrict streets, with brick domiciliates of five and even seven storeys high, large enough for 200 people to live in, and the gardens and funfairs surrounding the city.

The Mosque of 'Amr in its thick was still the most striking of its constructions, which shows that there were hitherto no great palaces or government domiciliates. Kafur's own palace was outside, believably in the park called the " Garden of Kafur," though at a time he built a new palace, at the cost of 100000 dinars, by the pool of Karun, near the masjid of Ibn-Tulun; but the miasma from the dead water soon induced its desertion.

The capital was course very differently deposited from the present Cairo. The Nile Riverhad then hardly set out the slow agitating of its bed toward the west, which ensued in the constitution of the island of Bulak or el-Gezira. The river in the Ikhshid's time coursed under the walls of the palace of Babylon, skirted el-'Askar, and surpassed the points now acknowledged as the Bab-el- Luk and Bab-el- Hadid. 1 All the districts of Masr-el-'Atika, Kasr-el-'Eyny, Kasred-Dubara, and Bulak were then subaquatic, and the capital banquet along the banks of the Nile and stretched inland to near the mosque of Ibn-Tulun.