Um-El-Dunya, they call it in Arabic; Mother of the World. Jerusalem impresses, Rome dazzles, but in no other place on Earth do the ancient and the vibrantly contemporary coexist as compellingly as they do in Egypt.

Two thousand years before the Mycenaeans began forging bronze weapons in Greece, Egypt’s fabulously wealthy culture was at its apex, engineering huge cities, exporting religious pantheons and innovating surgical techniques. In greater Cairo alone (which today has a population of 22 million), the built environment spans 5000 years, from the step pyramid at Saqqara in the west – the oldest completed stone building known to humans – to the medieval citadel of Salah El-Din in the east, and old Coptic Cairo to the south, with its 1700-year-old Byzantine churches.