Cairo fifty years ago Author:Edward William Lane Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: wall, were not pulled down, but became the principal gates of the third wall. The Bab- el-Bahr (or Gate of the River), more commonly called in the present day Ba... more »b-el- Hadid (or the Gate of Iron, from its iron casing), was built with the third wall. This wall was entirely of stone. ' He [Saladin] made the wall of el-Kahira to extend from the Bab-el-Kantara as far as the Bab-esh- Sha'riya, and from the Bab-esh-Sha'riya to the Bab-el-Bahr. He built also the Kal'at el-Maks. This was a great tower (burg) by the Nile, adjacent to the Garni' el-Maks. At this spot the wall of el-Kahira terminated. He had hoped to continue it until it united with the wall of [Old] Masr. He also extended the wall of el-Kahira from the Bab-en-Nasr and Bab-el-Barkiya and Darb Butut to the outside of the Bab-el-Wezlr, where it united with the wall of the Citadel.'1 In the reign of el-Hakim, the third of the Fatirnid Khalifas of Egypt (a.d. 996- 1020), the people began to build suburbs outside the southern gates of el-Kahira, where,before that period, there were no buildings nearer than el-Katai'.1 An extensive suburb soon arose, which, after the great famine in the reign of el-Mustansir, increased rapidly, while el-Fustat declined; but afterwards the Sultan Salah-ed-dln, when he built the Citadel, pulled down a vast number of the houses of this suburb and made gardens there, which extended all the way from the Bab-Zuweyla to the tomb of Sitta Nefisa, which is at the extremity of the present suburbs. The Bab-Zuweyla might be seen at that time from the door of the mosque of Ibn-Tulun. After 700 (a.d. 1300-1) all this tract was built upon again, and became, as before, an extensive suburb.2 The suburbs on the west of the canal were the last that were built. In the ninth century after the Flight that tract was c...« less