Cairo

Babylṓn (Βαβυλών) is the Greek name of the fortress town at the head of the Nile Delta, on the east bank opposite the pyramids, that underlies Old Cairo. Diodorus, in the first century BCE, records the legend that explained the transplanted name: captives brought from Mesopotamian Babylon by a conquering pharaoh were said to have settled and named the place. Strabo, who saw it a generation later, describes a strong natural fortress held by one of Egypt’s three Roman legions. The legend is almost certainly folk etymology; modern scholarship suspects the Greek name reshaped some Egyptian original, though no candidate has won acceptance, and the entry keeps the derivation open.

The name is the atlas’s best example of a toponym stranded far from its family. Its consonants belong to Bāb-ili, “gate of the god,” on the Euphrates, and the family tree binds this entry to that page; but nothing else connects the two places except the name and a story invented to excuse it. What the name did next matters more than where it came from: the fortress was the hinge of the Arab conquest of Egypt, besieged and taken in 640, and Fustat was founded in its shadow, which is why Cairo’s page begins here. The most famous city-name of Mesopotamia thus ends its ancient career in Egypt, guarding the river crossing where the next civilization’s capital would grow; Babylon’s name, like its captives in the legend, finished its service far from home.

Babylōn (ⲃⲁⲃⲩⲗⲱⲛ) is the Coptic name of the fortress town, taken over from the Greek and carried in Coptic documents, martyrologies, and episcopal lists through the Christian centuries of Egypt and far beyond the Arab conquest. The see of Babylon was among the bishoprics of the Egyptian church, and the fortress quarter, with churches built into and above the Roman walls, remained a center of Coptic life while first Fustat and then al-Qāhira rose beside it; in time the patriarchate itself settled in the area, making the old fortress the effective heart of Egyptian Christianity.

The entry’s significance is survival in place. Every other name on this page belongs to a new city built beside the old ones; Babylōn alone stayed fixed to its ground and its community, shrinking from the name of a Roman garrison town to the name of a quarter, but never lapsing, while the metropolis around it changed names twice. The Coptic quarter of Old Cairo is still called Babylon in the church’s usage today, its Hanging Church suspended over the Roman gate towers. Cairo buried the fortress but never the name: the Copts still worship in Babylon, a city inside a city, keeping a name from another river a thousand miles from where it was coined.

Miṣr (مصر) is, on this page, a city: the name of Egypt applied to Egypt’s capital. The usage began with the conquest, when the garrison city of Fustat, founded in 641, became Miṣr al-Fusṭāṭ and then simply Miṣr; the common noun miṣr, “garrison town,” plural amṣār, was the standard term for the conquest settlements, and in Egypt the country’s own ancient name and the generic word collapsed into each other. When al-Qāhira absorbed Fustat’s role, it inherited the usage whole, and Miṣr has meant the capital in everyday Egyptian speech ever since, down to the modern colloquial Maṣr for Cairo.

The entry is the strangest member of the mṣr family, the atlas’s oldest Semitic name-thread, which runs from Akkadian Miṣru through Hebrew Miṣrayim to the Arabic name of Egypt and, in the Phase 2.5 sweep, as far as Chinese Wùsīlí. Everywhere else the thread names the country; here alone it narrows to a single city, four thousand years of a name funneled to a point at the head of the Delta. The metonymy runs opposite to the world’s usual habit, where capitals lend their names outward (a “Rome” that means the empire); Egypt instead poured the country’s name into its capital. Ask for Miṣr inside Egypt and you will be shown not the country but Cairo, as if the whole land kept one front door and hung its name on it.

al-Qāhira (القاهرة), “the Victorious,” is the name of the palace city the Fatimid general Jawhar founded north of Fustat in 969, after conquering Egypt for the caliph al-Muʿizz. The tradition reported by the Egyptian historians, at length in al-Maqrīzī, holds that the city was first called al-Manṣūriyya, after the caliph’s father’s capital in Ifriqiya, and renamed al-Qāhira by al-Muʿizz on his arrival; a famous founding legend adds an astrological gloss, that the planet Mars, al-Najm al-Qāhir, the subduing star, was in the ascendant when the walls were traced, making the city named for the planet as much as for the victory. Through Italian Cairo the name entered the European languages.

Among the victory names of this atlas, al-Qāhira is the one that grew into its boast. Founded as a closed royal enclosure, a rectangle of palaces the public could not enter, it became under the Ayyubids and Mamluks the open metropolis of the Islamic world, the seat to which even the caliphal title retreated after Baghdad fell in 1258. The name’s career thus ran opposite to Baghdad’s on this cluster: there the official name lost to the ground’s old name, while here the dynasty’s chosen name conquered completely, erasing al-Manṣūriyya within a decade and eventually standing for the whole ancient stack of cities beneath it. The Fatimids’ astrologers, for once, advertised accurately; the subduing star’s city subdued even its own past.

The crusaders’ name for Cairo, Babylonia, continuing the Greek name of the Roman fortress of Babylon on the Nile beside which Fustat, and then Cairo, grew. In the Latin of the crusading age the Egyptian capital is Babylonia and its Ayyubid and Mamluk rulers are the soldanus Babilonie, the “sultan of Babylon”; Oliver of Paderborn’s Historia Damiatina, the eyewitness account of the Fifth Crusade, narrates an army that took Damietta as the first step on the road to Babylonia. The usage held to the end of the period, long after the Mesopotamian Babylon itself was a ruin known mostly from books.

The name carried more than geography. The Latin West already had a Babylon, the Babylon of the prophets and the Apocalypse, and a war against the “sultan of Babylon” arrived already charged with that scripture; the accident by which a Roman garrison fort had borne the old Mesopotamian name let crusade preaching collapse the two cities into one. The page’s pattern makes the irony visible: the Greek and Coptic entries above record how a fortress kept Babylon’s name on the Nile for a thousand quiet years, and this entry records what happened when that quiet name met an apocalyptic imagination. The crusaders sailed against the great city of their own age under the name of a city that no longer existed; the real Babylon lay silent under Mesopotamian silt while its name, on the Nile, commanded armies.