Chapter summary:
Between the pyramids and the Mukattan Hills rests the large, wide valley over which modern Cairo sprawls. This valley was once more than eight hundred feet below the sea and some thirty to forty miles across. The enormous river gradually dried up thousands of years ago and became heavily forested and rich in game – elephants, hippopotamus, antelope and all manner of deer and birds. The river, then as now, was rich in fish. Beautiful sunshine for most of the year coupled with the endless flow of water made life easy for hunters. This is why Egypt has one of the oldest civilisations in the world, comparable to that of China along the Yangtse and Yellow Rivers or Mesopotamia between the Tigris and Euphrates.
The first Europeans here were Greeks who built a city at Heliopolis on the east bank of the Nile. The Romans built Babylon north of Heliopolis, the Arabs built Fustat/Misr still further north and, in the late Middle Ages, the port moved north — first to Maks and then Bulaq. As the ports migrated, so did the entrance to the Red Sea-Nile canal from the river. A wealth of evidence from Greek, Roman and Arab writers states that the canal enabled ships to carry goods from the Nile to the Red Sea. Grain was transported from the wheat fields of the Sudan to Rome, Mecca, Arabia and India. Chinese porcelain and silk could be brought to Rome; Venetian glass to India.
Excavation sites in the southern suburbs of Cairo have produced Chinese ceramics dating from the 10th to the 14th centuries. The Karim, an association of Jewish merchants who for hundreds of years financed trade between the Middle East and China, lubricated this extraordinary trade in porcelain and ceramics. The Karim had their own warehouses (fonduqs) stretching from Cairo to India and beyond. They built their own ships and sometimes leased them to others. They also operated as bankers, which proved to be their undoing. In 1398, the Karim made a massive loan to the Mamluk sultan, to finance an army to halt Tamburlaine’s march toward Cairo. When the loans were called, the Sultan came up short. Al Ashraf Barsbey nationalised the Nile-Red Sea canal to replenish his coffers, setting the prices at which goods brought through Egypt could be bought and sold. With a single stroke, the security for the Karim’s loans — trade through the canal – unravelled. The Karim were ruined within decades. When China withdrew from the world stage in the 1430’s, after Zheng He’s final voyage, Chinese goods came no more.
Zheng He’s sailors would have seen, alongside Al Azhar mosque, two imposing complexes: the madrassah and the Wikala of al Ghuri, named after one of the later Mamluk Sultans. Wikala is the Egyptian name for a caravanserai. In the caravanserai of Al Ghuri, merchants from China laden with gold, silk and ceramics could rest in simple, clean surroundings, a stone’s throw from the cool mosque. In Zheng He’s time, there were eleven caravanserais in Cairo, twenty-three markets for international trade, fifty smaller markets (soukhs) for local trade, and eleven race courses! In the late Middle Ages Cairo was the world’s leading emporium for three of the most important commodities of international trade – gold, spice and perfume. Every sort of spice was for sale, along with all manner of silks and more mundane goods — fruits, nuts and jams galore. Remarkably, almost everything sold here today was available to Zheng He’s sailors and Chinese merchants as they passed through Cairo in 1433.
Further reading
Tai Peng Wang – Zheng He and his envoy’s visit to Cairo – click here
The Wadi Tumilat and the Canal of the Pharaohs:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/545471
Stanley Lane Poole: A history of Egypt in the Middle ages:
http://books.google.co.uk/books?id=OzUix2rKFqwC&printsec=frontcover
New light on the beginnings of the Karim merchants, by S. D. Goitein:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/3596014
Chinese porcelain from Fostat by R. L. Hobson:
http://www.jstor.org/pss/865177
Monsoon seas – the Story of the Indian Ocean, by Alan Villiers:
http://www.questia.com/library/book/monsoon-seas-the-story-of-the-indian-ocean-by-alan-villiers.jsp
