ScienceNorth Africa
Cairo and al-Azhar
A city founded as a capital, and a school still teaching
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Cairo became the largest city in the Mediterranean and a hub for the trade between the Indian Ocean and Europe before the Portuguese bypassed it. The Geniza archive in one of its synagogues preserved hundreds of thousands of everyday documents from the tenth to the thirteenth centuries — letters, accounts, marriage contracts — giving an unmatched view of ordinary medieval lives.
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The Fatimids founded Cairo as a new capital and built the al-Azhar mosque, which became a place of learning. It still teaches today, over a thousand years later, and ranks among the world's oldest continuously operating universities.
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Part of Terra Saga — the story of Earth on a timeline. terrasaga.org